
Class J 
Book 



?.^ \ y \ 



b ^ 



%right]^". 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSrR 



THE FACTS OF LIFE 



THE 

FACTS OF LIFE 

IN RELATION TO FAITH 



^:.)^ BY 

P?CARNEGIE SIMPSON, D. D 

AUTHOR OF ' THE FACT OF CHRIST ' 




, < 



HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1913, by 
GEORGE H. DORAN & COMPANY 



JAN28IS!4 

©CI.A361815 






®0 mg 31tfe 



PREFATORY NOTE 

This book is practically a sequel to The Fact 
of Christ (published in 1900), inasmuch as the 
topics discussed in these chapters — especially 
the later chapters — and many points raised in 
their treatment have been suggested mainly 
through the correspondence which his earlier 
work brought to the author from varied quar- 
ters. He can hardly expect that this volume, 
dealing as it does with questions chosen just on 
account of the difficulties they present to many 
perplexed or inquiring minds, will receive the 
measure of acceptance so kindly accorded to its 
predecessor; but if in some degree it helps, it 
will not altogether fail of its end. The two 
books are written for persons at somewhat 
different stages. The writer of the very ad- 
mirable French translation of The Fact of 
Christ — Dr. Maurice Dusolier — says in his 
introduction that in that volume is 'a faith 
gushing out of the heart' (^une foi jaillie du 

vii 



viii PREFATORY NOTE 

coeur^). The present discussions, it is to be 
feared, are more laboured in their faith. But 
they are written at a spot further inland on 
the 'isthmus' of life, to which reference is made 
in the opening chapter; and travellers at that 
stage will make allowance for the difficulty of 
the road. Perhaps the march becomes lighter 
again further on. 

A few sentences in Chapter vi. are repro- 
duced, with little modification, from a contri- 
bution by the present writer to a series of lec- 
tures on the Creed, published in 1904 under 
the title of Questions of Faith, but now out of 
print. The stanzas quoted opposite the begin- 
ning of Chapter ill. are taken from a small 
book, privately printed, entitled, ^Verses by 
M. T.'; they are by Lady Thomson, and the 
book is that mentioned in the Life of Lord 
Kelvin, vol. i. p. 533. For several other quo- 
tations and references, the writer is indebted 
to his friend and late assistant the Rev. J. D. 
M. Rorke, M.A., who further has given him 
more than one useful suggestion. P. C. S. 

1913- 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTORY 

PAGE 

THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE .... 3 



I 

THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 27 

II 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 55 

III 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 89 

IV 

THE REALITY OF CHRIST 121 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

V 

PAGE 

THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 167 

VI 
THE VETO OF DEATH 207 

VII 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 249 



INTRODUCTORY 
THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE 



'The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can 
use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements 
of our demands on ourselves and on one another. Re- 
ligions have approved themselves; they ministered to 
sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When 
they violated other needs too strongly, or when other 
faiths came which served the same needs better, the 
first religions were supplanted.' WILLIAM JAMES. 



INTRODUCTORY 

THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE 

A NOTABLE and interesting feature of much of 
modern thinking on the deeper problems of the 
mind and soul is that, more and more, the truth 
about these is sought and tested not abstractly, 
but in experience. The philosophy of William 
James exemplified this in what he called prag- 
matism ; and Dr. Rudolf Eucken has developed 
it more generally in what he calls activism. 
These are new words, but what they essentially 
mean is not so new. Just as Moliere's Bour- 
geois Gentilhomme had talked prose for forty 
years without knowing he had been literary, so 
most men who, in any real sense, are living life 
and who bring their experience and their minds 
together, are something of pragmatists or vital- 
Ists without any consciousness of being philo- 
sophical. 

3 



4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Here, indeed, is the third stage in any intelli- 
gent man's relation to his faith. The first stage 
is that of childhood, when we believe what we 
are told to believe, whether it be God or fairies. 
When we outgrow this — most of us do — we be- 
gin to scrutinise with our reason what we have 
been told, and to refuse further credence to 
what can not satisfy us with rational proof. At 
this point the battle between faith and unbelief 
is often sharply waged. Yet it is not here that 
it is finally lost or won. There awaits us an- 
other transition — less assertive than that from 
credulity to criticism, but more profound and 
conclusive. It is the transition from criticism 
to experience, from the mere dialectics of rea- 
soning to the actualities of life. Here — for the 
really living man — is faith's grand climacteric. 
And our final creed is what we have not merely 
thought through, but lived through. 

This is a change not easy to analyse, be- 
cause it is gradual, unobtrusive, and indeed, for 
the most part, subconscious. We may fail not 
merely to recognise it in others, but even to 
realise it in ourselves. It goes on, however, 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

inevitably within every man who (as I have 
just put it) is bringing his mind and his ex- 
perience together; and its conclusions are final 
in a sense in which the opinions of the critical 
reason — confident as these generally are — can 
not maintain themselves to be. As men grow 
older their actual and operative faith or un- 
faith — which may be something very different 
from that which, from custom or prudence, they 
profess — comes more and more to be based on 
and limited by what in their lives has proved 
itself to be real and adequate. This modifies 
what even their logic may think it can prove or 
disprove. Indeed, one great part of intelli- 
gence in life is just to recognise that, in all 
human, and especially spiritual, affairs, logic 
must be kept amenable to experience. As a 
man goes on in life he finds that there is a 
realm of truth and good at once larger and 
surer than the one of logical argument — larger, 
for there is much he comes to know in life 
which the merely critical reason could never 
discover or demonstrate, and also surer, be- 
cause this kind of experience is more a fact of 



6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

his life than Is the sun. This does not mean 
any discrediting of reason. But it means that 
reason, in its full and true sense, is not merely 
an instrument of logical or historical or critical 
ratiocination. Reason in its full and true sense 
is the intelligent relation between man and his 
whole world. To give it another name, it is 
not mere reasoning, mere science, but wisdom. 
And to this wisdom, life contributes more even 
than logic. 

An actual example of what I mean, and one 
from the mental career of a distinguished man, 
may be found in the writings of that sincere 
thinker and eminent biologist, George John 
Romanes. In early life Romanes published a 
treatise entitled A Candid Examination of 
Theism, in which he maintained what may be 
described as materialistic or agnostic conclu- 
sions. In a later work, however, he greatly 
modified and in part retracted these views, and 
his explanation of this change is interesting. It 
was not that he had discovered his reasoning 
to have been at fault ; on the contrary, he says, 
*as a matter of mere ratiocination, I am not 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

likely to detect any serious flaws.' But he 
found that his earlier book was written with 
what he calls 'undue confidence in syllogistic 
conclusions' ; and he confessed the modification 
of his views to be 'due not so much to logical 
processes of the intellect' as to the ripening 
'experience of life.'^ Here is exactly the tran- 
sition of which I am speaking. 

We all make it if we are living life in the 
world at all. And we must live life in the 
world. There is no other place for us in which 
to live it. A man is neither truly a saint nor 
truly a philosopher — and he may very probably 
be a prig or a fool to boot — who thinks this 
world is not the place for him to live, and 
whose experience of life round about him is 
not a great and a welcome part of his education 
in truth. Therefore our life, as we live it, 
should influence our faith, as it influences every- 
thing else. Religious belief should become, if 
not less and less a thing arguable in logic, cer- 
tainly more and more a thing tested in experi- 
ence. And, as a matter of fact, as men grow 

^ Romanes' Thoughts on Religion, p. loo, 
2 



8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

older they care comparatively little for the pros 
and cons of mere apologetic debate. Mr. 
Lecky has put it thus: — 

*Young men discuss religious questions simply as 
questions of truth and falsehood. In later life they 
more frequently accept their creed as a working 
hypothesis of life: as a consolation In innumerable 
calamities: as the one supposition under which life 
is not a melancholy anticlimax: as the indispensable 
sanction of moral obligations: as the gratification 
and reflection of needs, Instincts, longings which are 
placed In the deepest recesses of human nature: as 
one of the chief pillars on which society rests.' ^ 

It is more simply expressed in Tolstoy's master- 
piece, where, in a discussion about immortality, 
Prince Audrey says : 'Yes, that 's Herder's 
theory, but it 's not that, my dear boy, convinces 
me; life and death have convinced me.'^ So it 
is with all of us who are living life at all. It is 
'life and death' that make us believers — or un- 
believers. 

This is true, of course, of many forms of 

1 Lecky's Map of Life, p. 212. 

2 War and Peace, Pt. v. chap. xii. 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

thought or belief. It Is true of all aspects of 
what, In contradistinction from such operations 
of abstract thought as pure mathematics, may 
be called humane truth. It is particularly true 
of ethical, spiritual, and religious. In ethics, 
for example, Aristotle's definition of virtue 
recognises this amenableness of theory to prac- 
tical life when it says virtue is to be determined 
not only 'by reason,' but also 'in the way the 
man of practical reason would determine it.'^ 
Of such a spiritual thing as love we all say with 
Browning: 'And live be a proof of this.'^ But 
nowhere is this appeal to experience more Im- 
portant than in religion, and above all in the 
Christian religion. Certainly any intelligent 
Christian faith should be ready to meet the 
challenge of the reason, and not afraid to meet 
its criticisms on their own ground. Still, the 
crucial evidence is found in the experience of 
the life lived in fellowship with Christ. The 
man who has this can indeed believe, and as 
he does he says with St. Paul: 'I know' — not 
merely I know about — 'in whom I have be- 

^ Nic. Eth., ii. 6, 15. ^ By the Fireside, xxxix. 



lo THE FACTS OF LIFE 

lieved.' He Is Bernard's Expertus potest cre- 
dere. No doubt, all this may be assumed 
unwarrantably and even falsely. A shallow 
man and, still worse, a hypocrite may profess 
an experience which he does not really know. 
Men may plagiarise in religion as well as in 
literature. Still, beyond all question, what is 
called Christian experience — in repentance, 
faith, prayer, obedience, and the peace and joy 
and strength of a new life — is a real document 
htimain, and it rightly gives an assurance which 
nothing merely external can do. The Chris- 
tian's is essentially a creed of experience. 

This has been often said, and need not here 
be reiterated at length. Yet — and here is the 
subject of these chapters — is there not another 
side to this? 

Experience is a large word. If you appeal to 
life for confirmation of your faith, to life you 
must go. And you must go to it as a whole, 
not to some selected portion of It. You must 
go to it open-eyed, wearing no theological or 
ecclesiastical blinkers which shut off large areas 
of unwelcome facts, but viewing the world as 



INTRODUCTORY n 

it is, and all of it. Nothing short of this is 
fully and fairly to appeal to experience. But 
when we do this, does it not give us pause? 
Does it not chill rather than confirm our faith? 
Can it be fairly said that the facts of life — 
not of some secluded section of it within the 
cloister of the pious soul's experience but of 
the world, 'which is the world of all of us' — 
plainly support the assertions, the assurances, 
the hopes and the ideals of faith? When the 
receptive and candid mind goes forth to all the 
data of history and life, it is often hard for 
such faith to maintain its position. Yet this is 
not a going out to what is false, still less to 
what is sinful. It is a going out simply to the 
complete world of experience, outward and in- 
ward. There, to many a man, much of what 
Christian thought and feeling have found and 
nurtured in their concentration upon the area 
of religion becomes remote, foreign, out of 
place. It is like something which we read 
about in the life, say, of Tibet. It may be true 
in its world, but it seems hardly real in the 
world. At most it is something which, as a 



12 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

modern play phrases It, 'one meets with no- 
where except in Judaea.'^ 

Here is a problem for faith which deserves 
far more attention than the more open assaults 
upon belief which come from unbelieving think- 
ers and writers. Such men rise up periodically, 
and have done so from the days of Celsus on- 
ward. Hardly any of these attacks have long 
survived — though sometimes they have inter- 
estingly revived — but they produce a sensation 
and, perhaps, a panic for a while. Young men 
alarm their mothers by airing the latest ra- 
tionalism, and worthy divines prepare sermons 
to refute it. After a little it dies -away, and 
the world waits for the next clever man to 
arise to show it a better faith than that of 
the apostles. Christianity has had many such 
^crises' of faith, and will have many more. But 
the most real and the permanent problem of 
faith is not here. It is not created by some 
clever critic. It arises out of life itself. It is 
that, as has been already indicated, the facts 
of life, looked at broadly and candidly, seem 

1 Maeterlinck's Mary Magdalene, Act i. sc. iv. 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

to discredit faith or, at least, do not support 
its message. The gospel, in a word, does not 
echo in the actual world. This is a genuine 
problem. It is, in a peculiar degree, the danger 
which assails faith in what Is really its most 
trying period — that of mid-life. Preachers 
and others often speak as if youth were the 
dangerous time of life. This Is a mistake. 
There is a saving Idealism about even the 
errors of youth — except in abnormal cases — 
which preserves it from the worst dangers. 
The ^middle watch' is the most trying time. 
To change the figure, human life is an isthmus 
between two eternal seas. It is when we are 
in the valley midway, 'Inland far,' — having lost 

'sight of that Immortal sea 
Which brought us hither/^ 

and not yet having borne in upon our ears the 
solemn boom of the great ocean whither we 
go — that faith, and character too, are most 
surely tested. And one great element in this 
trial is just, as I have been saying, that all 

1 Wordsworth, Ode on the Intimation of Immortality, ix. 



14 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

around us seems to respond so little to the 
message of the gospel with which the whole 
world seemed to be so thrillingly alive as we 
first stepped out upon the way of life. 

Now it will at once be said by at least some 
readers that all this arises from a poor religious 
life lived at a low and Sadducean temperature. 
It is easy to say that. And it has in it the 
reminder of a grave truth. Nothing is more 
true than that a man's life reacts on his belief. 
In particular, a man who is deliberately and 
habitually so living that he does not want the 
law and the gospel of Christ to become too 
plain and authoritative to him, will succeed in 
making much of faith at least disputable and 
so dismissable. He may talk much about his 
'honest doubts,' but the root of that man's 
unfaith is his dishonest sins. In all wilful 
sinning there is an element of the morally dis- 
honest. Sin is never the result of really faith- 
ful thinking and faithful living. And this 
affects all our belief. Certainly it is not pos- 
sible for one who is deliberately living a bad 
life, and means to go on living it, to be even 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

Intellectually sincere towards the truth that Is in 
Jesus Christ. All this is gravely true, and we 
cannot be too gravely reminded of It. At the 
same time, It were, I think, quite an unjust 
thing to ascribe the problem for faith of which 
I have been speaking only to sinful or Saddu- 
cean character and life. It may arise, and 
often does arise, from very different reasons, 
of which I shall mention two. It may arise 
from not any kind of dishonesty, but, on the 
contrary, the very desire to know just the truth 
of things. Or it may arise from not any 
Sadducean Indifference, but, on the contrary, a 
deepening earnestness about the questions of 
faith, and the feeling that these grow more 
difficult as they grow more real. Let us look 
for a moment at each of these. 

I say first, the problem may arise from the 
desire to know the truth. The one thing a man 
of character and seriousness w^ants in religion 
is just the truth. Here again there is a differ- 
ence as compared with youth. When youth 
first comes in contact with the world, what it 
desires and even needs is less the actual than 



1 6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

the Ideal. Our mother, Nature, means that 
we should be educated first by the generous 
illusions of life, and a premature wisdom about 
life's realities is alien to her wise and gentle 
leading. This applies to many things and, 
among them, even to faith. When we are 
young, then. Browning's way of putting Chris- 
tianity is the right way: 'Has it your vote to 
be true ?' ^ But with the grown man it is differ- 
ent. He will vote only for what experience 
shows to be solid. He is interested not in a 
mere ideal hut in the actual. The most helpful 
thing that can be said or done to many a youth 
of twenty is just to slap him on the back and 
tell him life is a splendid thing; but you can 
neither do the one nor merely say the other 
to a man of forty, whose experience has told 
him a chequered tale not easily harmonised 
with the simpler ideals of faith. This some- 
times develops in men a hardened and worldly 
cynicism — a deadly mental and moral sin which 
has the virtue neither of youth nor of age. 

1 1 recall how eflFectlvely Professor Henry Druramond used 
to ask this in his famous addresses to students. 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

But, on Its good side, It develops rather the 
temper which knows nothing Is of real use that 
Is not really true. Goethe says that 'error may 
be quite right so long as we are young, but we 
must not carry It on with us Into age.'^ And 
It is because of what seems the truth of the 
actual facts of the world and of life that a 
problem for faith Is raised in the mind of so 
many who have got to the stage of this maxim 
and whom it were most unjust to denounce as 
either Sadducean or of dubious morals. This 
Is one reason why people in middle life do 
not talk of religion as readily as the young 
or the old do. 

But further: faith, I said, becomes more 
difficult as life grows more real. So long as 
a man's faith is something still merely on the 
surface of his life — by which I mean not that 
it is therefore insincere, but that it has not 
yet had occasion to be wrought, through trial 
and discipline, into the deeper parts of his 
nature — he may believe facilely. But it is not 
a facile thing to believe when a man is face 

1 Maximen und Reflexionen, 72. 



1 8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to face with the real issues of life and death. 
Faith then, too, becomes a matter of life or 
death for the soul. There is a whole world 
of difference between the question as it presents 
itself to the budding student of philosophy who 
sits with his books about him and begins to 
write an essay on the credibility of something 
in the Christian faith, and to whom to give 
up this or that is merely to revise an opinion; 
and, on the other hand, the question present- 
ing itself to a man who sits with his ruined life 
about him or his dearest lying cold in the coffin, 
and to whom the message of Christ is the only 
alternative to desperation and despair. As the 
lines of Clough — a man typical of much that 
has been said in this chapter — truly put it: — 

' 'Tis not the calm and peaceful breast 
That sees or reads the problem true, 
They only know on whom 't has prest 
Too hard to hope to solve It too.'^ 

This is what I mean when I say that belief 

becomes not easier as life becomes more real. 

Thus, while admitting a grave element of 

^Miscellaneous Poems: 'In the Depths.' 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

truth In the connection between unbelief and 
sinful or Sadducean life, we cannot, I think, 
accept this as wholly meeting our problem, 
which I therefore restate. Is faith valid in 
face of all the facts of experience? Granted 
that a case, even a sincere and strong case, can 
be made for what Is described as the fact of 
Christ, and for the great intellectual, moral, 
and spiritual meanings which it contains, yet 
the thought will occur to the experienced and 
critical mind that this Is specialisation and is ex- 
posed to the dangers of specialisation. There 
are other facts which must be taken Into ac- 
count. And just as the scientific materialist 
should take more account than he usually does 
of what Christ Is, so the Christian believer 
must not fail to reckon with the facts In nature 
and In the w^orld, which are very different from 
and apparently alien to the religious data on 
which he Is apt so largely to dwell. In short, 
the danger of all specialisation — religious or 
non-religious — Is to mistake the thing we are 
working at for everything; and the cure for it 
is to remember that experience is a unity and 



20 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

truth a seamless garment, and the only way 
rightly to see life is (in Matthew Arnold's 
phrase on Sophocles) to see it steadily and see 
it whole. It is when they thus bring their faith 
out into life and face to face with all life's 
facts that many minds feel the shock of a great 
contradiction. There are many others, no 
doubt, who do not feel it; perhaps because in 
some cases they know God too deeply, and in 
others they do not know life deeply enough. 
Yet other minds, again, neither saintly nor 
shallow, seem able, when confronted with 
things that withstand faith, to slip past them 
as running water by a stone in its course, or to 
hop from a realm of faith to a realm of facts 
as occasion requires. But, as Plato says, phi- 
losophy 'thinks things together.' And, in this 
sense, all people are truly philosophers who 
are really living life and really applying their 
life to their religion and their religion to their 
life — especially the darker and more difficult 
parts of their experience. Maxim Gorky in 
one of his books says that ^every one who has 
a struggle to sustain in life' is a philosopher; 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

Indeed, 'more of a philosopher than Schopen- 
hauer himself, for abstract thought can never 
be cast Into such a correct and vivid plastic 
form as that in which Is expressed the thought 
born directly out of suffering.'^ It Is those 
whose thoughts are born In this fashion who, 
when they bring the great assertions and prom- 
ises of Christian faith face to face with what 
life has meant for them, feel the shock. It Is 
not that they adopt or profess positive un- 
belief; but faith seems to come to a stop. 
What such persons would say is, I think, some- 
thing such as this : 'We do not — or at least we 
would not — deny Christ; but It Is Impossible 
to ask us to deny the facts of life. We even 
desire a religious synthesis of the world, but 
it must be one not of some selected phenomena 
In It, but of the world as It actually Is and — 
so far as we may use the expression — the 
world as a whole. We seek to have life 
Illumined by faith, but It must really be life 
as we experience It which Is so Illumined, not 
some mere section of it seen under artificial 

1 Varenka Olesoiva, i. 31. 



22 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

light. We want to learn how to live and die, 
but not in a way which shuts its eyes to what 
life and death really are for men.' In words 
such as these might those of whom I am think- 
ing speak for themselves. Their attitude of 
mind is surely a most honest one. It is — at 
least for many — not only an honest but the 
inevitable attitude. Wordsworth speaks of 

'this very world which is the world 
Of ail of us — the place where, in the end, 
We find our happiness, or not at all.'^ 

What these lines say of happiness may be said, 
and not less truly, of faith. It is in 'this very 
world,' with the experience of it we have in 
our life, that we must find our faith. It is 
here 'or not at all.' 

This then is what we shall discuss in the 
following chapters — namely. Christian faith, 
not as considered by itself, but as standing 
amid and apparently against the facts of life 
and of the world. It is, of course, an almost 
limitless subject, for the facts of life and of 
the world are vast, and experience of them 

^French Rc'volution. 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

covers everything. Therefore we can deal with 
only a few questions which the general problem 
raises. But this really Is no loss. I think many 
will agree that one thing about life as it goes 
on is that the questions in It that really matter 
are found, after all, to be comparatively few. 
A great many things which used to seem to us 
to matter tremendously now are seen to be 
unimportant, or about them one Is content to 
be agnostic, as In many things even the Chris- 
tian must be; the real questions are now more 
real, but they are few. If In these pages we 
can touch only a few questions, I shall try to 
select those few which are the most real. We 
need not select them in any too formal plan. 
The most natural way to begin is, I think, to 
consider generally what questions are raised 
In the mind In this connection when we look 
round the face of the world; thereafter we 
shall as far as possible let each subject suggest 
to us the next. This is the way In which we 
think about the problems of life in the actual 
business of living, and I hope one may keep 
in touch with the living of life even in the 

writing of a book. 
3 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 



*The keener insight of the New Age and a more 
accurate acquaintance with the laws which govern 
alike our human life and Nature, make it quite clear 
that neither in the way of love nor in that of justice 
does Reality endorse our ethical demands. Nature's 
indifference to man's welfare is appalling, yet un- 
mistakable; and it is becoming increasingly plain that 
every attempt to shape our human world into a king- 
dom of justice and love proves lamentably inadequate 
and meets with restrictions at every turn.' 

RUDOLF EUCKEN. 



CHAPTER I 

THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 

The first and most general problem which 
arises out of the facts of experience to con- 
front and seemingly contradict faith is just that 
this world on the face of it, is such a strange 
and difficult place in which to beheve the gos- 
pel. Nature and life seem to tell a very differ- 
ent tale about their Author than that which 
we are told in church about our Father in 
heaven. 

There is, of course, a prior question as to 
whether they tell of any Author at all. But 
life is short and books should not be long; so 
I must be allowed here to postulate the exist- 
ence of God. The idea that evolution has 
made this postulate no longer tenable or neces- 
sary is now seen to be an entire fallacy. Not 
many decades ago orthodox religion was in 

27 



28 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

something of a panic about this. Bishops could 
hardly go to bed for fear of the apparition 
(as somebody's humorous pen put it) of 'an 
extraordinarily intelligent ape or an unusually 
hairy man,' and divines could not pass a chem- 
ist's shop without the apprehensive thought of 
some atheistically potent atom which might dis- 
pense with the Creator. Such alarms do not 
now perturb the slumbers even of a curate 
nor the perambulations of the humblest local 
preacher. We all see now that 'God is not 
less God, nor the creative energy less creative, 
because we are led to suppose that a lengthy 
instead of a sudden method was employed in 
the production of the Cosmos.'^ Evolution, 
that is to say — and it is a commonplace to say 
it — is a process, not a cause; it is a 'history,'^ 
which needs an Author as much as does the 
story described in the first chapter of the Book 
of Genesis. For that this cosmos of reason 
and beauty has been evolved through the 
chances of an infinite series of molecular vari- 

^ J. A. Syraonds's Essays, Speculatwe and Suggestive, p. lo. 
2 Huxley's own word for it. 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 29 

atlons is exactly as credible as that if a box 
of printer's type were shaken about in the dark 
for a very long time there might result a Ham- 
let or a Paradise Lost. The difficulty for faith 
about the facts of this world is not of this 
kind — not, at any rate, with straight and sen- 
sible minds. 

It is a moral rather than a merely logical 
problem, and may be stated thus. Here is 
religion, professing to come to us in God's 
name and telling us what are the things of 
transcendent importance in faith and life. And 
here is the world — God's world, surely — which 
seems utterly indifferent to these things. Na- 
ture takes simply no notice of the spiritual and 
ethical interests which, according to religion, 
are the supreme things in God and for man. 
It does not seem to exist in any connection 
with them. Yet this is the world in which man 
lives, and this nature he to at least some degree 
shares. There is an interesting problem here, 
and one which, in some respects, is a very diffi- 
cult one. This chapter will merely touch on 
its more general aspects; its features of special 



30 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

difficulty must be treated more fully in sub- 
sequent chapters. 

It is well to begin from the beginning, so I 
shall first state this topic as it arises out of the 
mere existence of things in the natural world. 
This is expressed in lively fashion in the fol- 
lowing passage from one of Walter Bagehot's 
stimulating essays : — 

'Every one who has religious ideas must have 
been puzzled by what we may call the irrelevance 
of creation to his religion. We find ourselves 
lodged in a vast theatre, in which a ceaseless action, 
a perpetual shifting of scenes, an unresting life, is 
going forward; and that life seems physical, im- 
moral, having no relation to what our souls tell us 
to be great and good, to what religion says is the 
design of all things. Especially when we see any 
new objects or scenes or countries we feel this. 
Look at a great tropical plant, with large leaves 
stretching everywhere, and great stalks branching 
out on all sides; with a big beetle on a leaf and a 
humming-bird on a branch, and an ugly lizard just 
below. What has such an object to do with us, 
with anything we can conceive or hope or imagine ? 
What could it be created for, If creation has a moral 
end and object? Or go Into a gravel-pit or stone- 
quarry; you see there a vast accumulation of dull 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 31 

matter, yellow or grey, and you ask, involuntarily 
and of necessity, why is all this waste, and irrele- 
vant production, as it would seem, of material? 
Can anything seem more stupid than a big stone as 
a big stone, than gravel for gravel's sake? What 
is the use of such cumbrous, inexpressive objects in 
a world where there are minds to be filled, imagi- 
nations to be aroused, and souls to be saved ?'^ 

I have quoted this at length because It would 
be a pity to break In on Bagehot's vivacious 
sentences; but the problem It presents Is one 
we need not feel too gravely. After all, where 
Is this 'Irrelevant world' of 'Inexpressive ob- 
jects' which has nothing to do 'with us' or 'with 
anything we can conceive or hope or Imagine' ? 
It exists only In the mind of the doctrinaire. 
The real world has everything to do with us 
and with what we can conceive and hope and 
Imagine. What but this Is the meaning of 
science and of art? Surely things are shot 
through with reason, and often with beauty 
too. 'How exquisitely,' as Wordsworth says, 

*the external world is fitted to the mind."^ 

'^Literary Studies, iii. (essay on 'The Ignorance of Man'). 
2 The Excursion: preface. 



32 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

In short, there is no such thing as 'dull matter.' 
There may be dull men. There is something 
'more stupid than a big stone as a big stone,' 
and that is the mind of Peter Bell, to whom a 
big stone exists only as a big stone and 'nothing 
more.' Tennyson's lines, addressed to not 
anything so important as 'a great tropical 
plant' but merely to a 'little flower,' are nearer 
to the truth of things: — 

'Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, In my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all In all, 
I should know what God and man is,' 

There is more philosophy here than in asking 
'What has such an object to do with usT I do 
not think that I need to dwell on this. I trust 
that, despite tropical plants, however great 
their stalks, despite humming-birds and even 
beetles, despite pits and quarries, yea, despite 
gravel itself, we may yet hold fast the faith. 
The problem, however, is more real, and 
must be treated more seriously when we look 
at the operations of the natural world. It is 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 33 

indeed not easy to perceive there any law or 
order which proceeds from the God of whose 
character Christian faith tells us in Christ. 
This is a rational world, but it is not plainly 
a moral world — still less a world illustrating 
the high ethical and spiritual laws of the gos- 
pel. The processes of nature seem to have 
nothing to do with considerations of morality, 
while its whole dominating principle of evolu- 
tion through a struggle for existence is ap- 
parently the very negation of the great spiritual 
principle of self-sacrifice. It is well known 
how emphatically Huxley asserted this in a 
notable Romanes lecture. 'It is impossible,' 
he said, 'to look the world in the face, and 
bring the course of nature into harmony with 
even the elementary requirements of the ethical 
ideal of the just and the good.' Indeed, 'the 
cosmic process,' he goes on to declare, 'has no 
kind of relation to moral ends.'^ There is a 
problem here which must be patent to every 
observant mind. 

^E'uolution and Ethics (in Collected Essays by Tt H. Hux- 
ley, ix. ii.). 



34 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

It is generally admitted that Huxley's state- 
ment of it is too one-sided. There is even in 
the struggle for existence another side, in which 
are developed the altruistic qualities of 'the 
love of mates, parental sacrifice, filial affection, 
the kindliness of kindred, gregariousness, so- 
ciality, co-operation, mutual aid, and altruism 
generally.'^ The business of evolution is love 
as well as hunger, and calls out self-sacrifice as 
well as self-preservation. The exaggeration 
of such a statement as that 'the cosmic process 
has no kind of relation to moral ends' is further 
apparent from the very fact that we are con- 
sidering this problem at all. For who or what 
is it that thus condemns the morality of nature? 
It is man, who is himself a product of nature 
and the crown of its evolution. Surely we 
cannot call that process altogether immoral 
which culminates in a protest in the name of 
morality. How does a non-moral system 
evolve a moral product? How — to put it 
more personally — did a non-ethical cosmic 
process develop so ethically sensitive a Ro- 
manes lecturer? 

1 Darivinism and Human Life, by J. Arthur Thomson, p. 88. 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 35 

So this sweeping arraignment of nature must 
be taken with some qualification. It Is really 
an arraignment of nature with part left out, 
and that part, In the end. Its full and final 
development In man. But if nature Is to be 
judged it must be judged as a whole, and 
further, its lower stages interpreted in terms 
of the later and higher. The whole of nature 
Includes morality In germ from an early stage, 
and certainly, in Its later stage. Includes human 
morality as really as the law of gravitation or 
the positively Immoral struggle for existence. 
Viewing thus nature as a whole, we find not 
simply that it is non-moral, and certainly not 
that it has 'no kind of relation to moral ends,' 
which is palpably not the fact, but that It is 
in part non-moral and In part moral. This, 
of course, Huxley admits — though he calls 
only the non-moral part 'nature' and, for no 
apparent reason, calls morality 'an artificial 
world' which man has built up within the other 
— and it is the opposition between them which 
Is his problem. In which he finds 'the roots of 
pessimism.' Now certainly If the non-moral 
part of nature which we see so largely in the 



2,6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

physical world and the moral part of It which 
wc see in man are merely set against one an- 
other, and the one part held to have no re- 
lation to the other, a dualism is declared which 
it is hard for faith to meet — not merely Chris- 
tian faith, but faith of any kind in a rational 
and moral cosmos; moreover, since man's re- 
sistance to the physical powers of the universe 
is futile, it would seem the only creed is an 
unhoping stoicism. But are we driven to this 
dualism and this pessimism? Is it not possible 
to discern a deeper unity which reconciles the 
difference and relieves the despair? 

Let us try to answer this question not so 
much by abstract philosophy about the world — 
really one can philosophise In an abstract way 
about the world to any conclusion — as by that 
appeal to experience of which so much was 
said In the opening chapter. Each of us finds 
the problem In miniature In the area of his 
own life. We are all denizens of this dual 
world — a world, on the one hand, of moral 
principles and Ideals, and, on the other, of 
conditions and forces about us which are In- 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 2>7 

different and hostile to these spiritual elements. 
Is this, in actual experience, merely a dualism, 
the one part of which has no relation to the 
other but that of indifference or alienation? 
I think we have only to look at the making 
of human character to see an answer to that 
question. The moral character of man is the 
unity which is deeper than this difference, and 
to it both aspects of this dual world contribute. 
For such character is the fruit not simply of 
spiritual instincts and ideals, or of these oper- 
ating in an ethical vacuum; it is the fruit of 
these rising up out of and maintaining them- 
selves against the neutrality and even the an- 
tagonism of a non-moral world. Whatever 
morality may mean for other beings and in 
other spheres, of which we know nothing, cer- 
tainly 'for beings such as we are and in such 
a world as this' (to use Butler's phraseology) 
the moral life means a moral choice and a 
moral conflict. And a moral choice means a 
morally neutral world in which to choose, and 
a moral conflict means even a hostile element 
in the world against which the moral ideal is 



38 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to be asserted. So the ethical indifference of 
the natural world and even its unethical proc- 
esses simply mean that nature will not bribe 
or coerce man's moral choice, and further, will 
test it. Consider how moral character would 
be practically meaningless if it were otherwise. 
If nature were insistently and immediately 
moral, we should not be. Let us imagine a 
world whose natural laws and processes were 
made palpably and invariably subject to moral 
canons, and observe the result. If the rain fell 
on the land only of the virtuous farmer, if 
calamity should depend on character, if gravi- 
tation should involve the sinner but exempt 
the saint from injury, then virtue would be 
prudential rather than moral, and goodness 
the saving less of the soul than of the skin. 
Morality, I repeat, is morality for man, only 
if it be a choice and a conflict; and the func- 
tion of the non-moral and. In places, anti-moral 
processes of nature is just that, in face of 
these, the moral consciousness may choose and 
may contend even against odds, and so be 
worthy of the name of moral. 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 39 

Thus If we view nature as a whole, Includ- 
ing therein the moral life of man, and Interpret 
Its lower stages In the light of Its higher, we 
find we must revise our characterisation of It 
as having no relation to moral ends. And to 
Interpret the lower In connection with the 
higher Is surely the only right way. Life — 
the life of nature as a whole or of any or- 
ganism In nature — Is a unity. Its meaning Is 
to be found In a synthesis, not merely In the 
analysis of sections taken separately. And the 
synthesis is not found in the incomplete but in 
the more complete — in the flower, not in the 
seed. Therefore it is no fond anthropocentric 
egotism but a true principle for either science 
or philosophy to find the key to all the prob- 
lems of nature — and certainly its deeper and 
more spiritual enigmas, such as this now be- 
fore us — in the moral self-consciousness of 
man which is the crown of nature. When we 
do this we find 'nature' even In Its limited 
physical sense to be part of the stuff from 
which man's moral life is made. The cosmic 
process is not ethical, but it is used for ethical 



40 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

ends. It is not the theatre only but also the 
needful, though unconscious, minister of the 
making of the moral life. 

All this is not merely of speculative interest; 
it is also of practical concern. If our doctrine 
of the world be that nature is hopelessly and 
finally non-ethical, and that it has 'no kind of 
relation^ to man's moral life, then it is im- 
possible not to be chilled in all our moral out- 
look and endeavour. We must feel that man 
has been placed in the wrong world for his 
spiritual ideals. Even when this does not lead 
us to give up the moral ideal altogether — as, 
perhaps, logically it should — certainly it dis- 
courages anything like a vigorous and victori- 
ous moral faith. We fall into the view of life 
in relation to nature pictured in Matthew Ar- 
nold's Empedocles in Etna, where man's aims 
and efforts are met at every turn by an indiffer- 
ent and ever opposing world which goes 
straight on with its life regardless of his, and 
the conclusion is that we must not seek too 
much, though, since some 'moderate bliss' is 
attainable, we need not wholly despair. It is 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 41 

of happiness the poet is speaking, but the con- 
clusion is still more easily reached as regards 
the spiritual ambition and endeavour. But this 
is not the wrong world for man's highest life. 
Just because it is a difficult world for his spir- 
itual ideals, it is the very world for moral choice 
and moral conflict and moral character. Poets 
more virile than Arnold — who seemed to be 
able to get good from nature only in certain 
kinds of weather — know this; Browning and 
still more George Meredith know it is through 
this antagonism that 'flesh unto spirit must 
grow.' And so I say again man is not in the 
wrong world for his spiritual ideals. He is in a 
world demanding moral choice and moral con- 
flict, and that is the very world for moral char- 
acter. 'Rephan' — the sphere void of effort and 
antagonism — is a poorer home for us than 
earth with all its struggles.^ To sum it up in 
a word, the moral life for us must be what- 
ought'tO'he differentiated from and maintained 
against the what-is; and thus nature — the great 
what'is — has its place, and its necessary place, 

1 Vide Browning's poem with this title in Asolando, 



42 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

in the ethical scheme of the life which is moral 
just because it is something more than natural. 
Let us then not see in the contradiction between 
the moral ideal within and the non-moral actual 
without merely (as Huxley does in the lecture 
already mentioned) 'the roots of pessimism;' 
let us find rather the conditions of morality 
itself. 

Hitherto I have been speaking only of the 
physical world of nature. But there is also 
round about us a spiritual world, by which I 
do not in the least mean here anything which 
theology may mean by that (or the Psychical 
Society may mean) , but only that we live amid 
a system of forces operating upon life and 
character and destiny other than merely the 
play of winds and waves. There are powers 
round about human life environing man with 
circumstance, meeting him with hap, following 
up his acts with consequences, in the end seal- 
ing his character and fate. What are we to 
think of this world in which our lives work out 
their lot? Is it, too, not a non-moral system 
in which it is impossible to read anything but 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 43 

chance and fate — a chance and fate far re- 
moved Indeed from the moral providence and 
fatherhood of the God revealed In Jesus 
Christ? This subject we shall discuss In the 
subsequent chapters of the book; and — for 
reasons I shall give presently before closing 
this chapter — I propose to discuss it not gen- 
erally but rather by taking up specific aspects 
of life where the problem is most distinct and 
acute. Meanwhile I shall make one general 
remark, and Illustrate It with a brief reference 
to the witness of the greatest name in literature. 
The general remark is that, just as we have 
seen that nature must not In every phenomenon 
remind us of moral laws and insist upon our 
obedience of them, so life must not do so in 
every incident. Therefore it is not any valid 
argument against the moral order of life if 
we find when we look at Isolated incidents 
(as most works of fiction do) that there is 
little moral purpose to be seen, but only hap 
and fate. It is, however, different when we 
look at long stretches of life and at experience 
as a whole. This difference Is apparent even 



44 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

In literature. Nothing Is more noticeable in 
modern literature than that it is the greatest 
writers, and those who treat life at length and 
on the grand scale, who most of all at least 
leave room in their presentation for deeper 
thoughts than that of our existence as mean- 
ingless and vain. As an example of this I name 
Tolstoy, not in his hortatory tracts — ^which, to 
me at least, are unconvincing and tiresome — 
but in such complete and superb canvases as 
Anna Karenina or War and Peace, But let us, 
without discussing modern writers, turn to the 
only greatest. 

The unique and incomparable authority of 
Shakespere for our present purpose arises not 
merely from his supreme pre-eminence on any 
matter of human life and character (except, it 
must be said, the life and character which are 
distinctively Christian), but also and particu- 
larly because he is so absolutely free from any 
preconceived moral or theological theory of 
life. He is the perfect secularist, simply seeing 
what men do and are, and setting down the 
facts of life. It is not for nothing that we 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 45 

cannot tell what Shakespere's religion was, or 
if he had any;^ if we could, *the less Shake- 
spere he.' As has been said of him by the most 
critically just and the most morally discerning 
of his modern interpreters: — 

*He looked at this '^secular" world most Intently 
and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but 
conclude, with entire fidelity, without the wish to 
enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essential, 
without regard to any one's hopes, fears, or beliefs. 
His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a 
mind of extraordinary power; and If, as a private 
person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can 
hardly have been In contradiction with this faith, 
but must have been included in it, and supple- 
mented, not abolished, by additional ideas.' ^ 

What then is Shakespere's 'tragic view' — 
his view, that Is to say, of human hap and fate 
in especially the darker aspects of life? No 
more carefully weighed and yet also more pro- 
foundly sympathetic answer to this question 
has been given than in the book from which 

^ Nothing can be more futile than the attempt to build up 
a theory of Shakespere's personal faith from sayings of the 
characters of his plays. 

2 A. C. Bradley's Shakesperian Tragedy, p. 25. 



46 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

I have just quoted. I shall do better to quote 
from it further than attempt any statement of 
my own. Mr. Bradley finds Shakespere's 
tragic world to be, on the one hand, 'some- 
thing piteous, fearful, and mysterious ;' yet, on 
the other, 'it does not leave us crushed, re- 
bellious, or desperate.' From this it seems 
that the ultimate power revealed therein is not 
a moral power in the sense of one always just 
or benevolent; yet neither is it 'a face, whether 
malicious or cruel, or blind or indifferent to 
human happiness or goodness,' and it is cer- 
tainly not a fate in the sense of 'a blank ne- 
cessity, totally regardless alike of human weal 
and of the difference between right and wrong.' 
It shows other characteristics 'which would 
lead us to describe it as a moral order and its 
necessity as a moral necessity.' It shows itself 
'akin to good and alien from evil.' It traces 
suffering and death to sin. It makes evil to 
work out everywhere 'as something negative, 
barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of 
death.' And when there comes tragic calamity, 
'the suffering and death arise from collision, 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 47 

not with a fate or blank power, but with a 
moral power.' With all this there is — what 
Shakespere again and again impresses on us, 
but not more often or more deeply than life 
itself does — an appalling 'waste' of good. Of 
this, which is the very essence of the tragic 
view of life, no solution is offered, unless by 
the suggestion, undefined but irresistible, at the 
close of the greatest tragedies — Hamlet and 
King Lear — that this tragic world is no final 
or complete reality, and that even its victims 
vanish (as Mr. Bradley finely puts it) 'not into 
nothingness but into freedom.'^ 

Such then, in the fewest words, is the 'tragic' 
world of human life as seen by the sanest, 
surest, and most searching eyes ever bent upon 
its multiplex mystery. Some readers of the 
foregoing paragraph may wonder that I have 
made so much of this. But any one who has 
not merely read Shakespere's plays or ana- 
lysed his dramatis persona, but tried, in some 
degree, to grasp as a whole the hardly less 

^ Shakesperian Tragedy, pp. 25, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38. 
Also, on the last point, pp. 322-7, which are pages worthy of 
their topic. 



48 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

than Infallibly just vision of life in the drama- 
tist's mind which Is so remarkably detached 
from all Its dramatic work yet surely also so 
deeply in it all, will understand that it is by 
no means an unimportant or Irrelevant thing 
to consider what Shakespere found In the world 
of life to be — the world In which we are asked 
to believe the gospel. Certainly he did not 
find it a world which declared the gospel; the 
world is not meant to do that. But he did 
not find it a world so morally dead and mean- 
ingless as practically to make a gospel impos- 
sible. This, I repeat, is not an irrelevant thing 
for faith to know. It permits us at least to 
listen whether there be not a gospel. 

This so-called 'indifferent world' then belies 
Its title. It is not so indifferent as It seems. 
Its physical phenomena are shot through with 
reason; Its moral neutrality Is the school of 
human character; Its life-order adumbrates a 
moral order even in its tragedy. 

I do not propose to discuss further the gen- 
eral question of the relation to faith of the 
world we live in; not that what has been said 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD ^9 

Is a complete argument, but because I believe 
that the real difficulties which most people feel 
on this subject are not about life and nature 
in general but arise out of certain things in 
the world. To these particular things, then, 
I shall now turn. They are old problems, and 
perhaps there is little or nothing new to say 
upon them. But they present themselves afresh 
to every thinking mind and call always for re- 
consideration. It Is true that the way of 
modern thinkers Is to pass over these definite 
questions and to give us disquisitions at large 
about life and a principle of the universe. I 
know that exponents of such modern thinkers 
as Dr. Eucken and M. Bergson regard the dis- 
cussion of 'the time-worn problems of destiny, 
freedom, and the mystery of pain and evil' as 
an out-of-date survival of that 'Intellectualism' 
from which the conceptions of activism and 
creative evolution have liberated the mind/ 
Well, we have all been stimulated by these 
attractive and Invigorating writers, and par- 
ticularly with the brilliant suggestiveness of the 

^ Eucken and Bergson, by E. Hermann, p. 1:42. 



50 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

idea of devolution creatrice (the value of which 
as a reaction against a mechanical and ma- 
terialistic evolutionary doctrine is very highly 
to be estimated even by those who find some 
difficulty in M. Bergson's writings in knowing 
where seductive metaphor ends and solid data 
begin) ; but, for my humble part, I find, after 
reading these general philosophical systems, 
that the difficulties which seem to contradict 
my faith in the gospel — the real and nameable 
and concrete difficulties of life — are exactly 
where they were. Indeed, I often feel that 
the systematic philosopher knows little of doubt 
in the real and deadly sense. The truth is — 
though in saying this I mean no kind of dis- 
respect to the works of philosophical system — 
it is so easy to generalise. And there is noth- 
ing about which to generalise is so easy as just 
the universe. It is easier to philosophise about 
the universe than to face this or that difficult 
thing in it, jut as it is easier to make sapient 
observations about human nature than justly 
to judge the character of this or that man or 
woman. Therefore in these pages I am going 



THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 51 

to turn again to these definite 'time-worn prob- 
lems,' because I am sure it is in these, and not in 
the world at large, that most men find their 
faith most really challenged. I give notice of 
this in order that the reader who prefers to 
discuss the general philosophy of the universe 
may at this point — if indeed he has not done 
it already — throw this book away. 



II 

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 



'If God I sought where He has wrought 

Works lovely and sublime, 
With eyes of doubt, Pain pointed out 

Earth's misery and crime. 

From summer skies and sunset dyes 

He takes the glory quite. 
Nor lets me see (so cruel he) 

The splendours of the night. 

Now where is rest, when such a guest 

Me ever followeth. 
Nor lets me clasp with desperate grasp 

The outstretched hand of Death?' 

M. T. 



CHAPTER II 

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 

The two features of the world which at once 
and palpably seem in conflict with faith in God 
are suffering, which is in apparent contradic- 
tion to Divine Love, and sin^ which is out of 
harmony with Divine Righteousness. These 
are indubitably connected; yet each presents 
its own problem. That of suffering lies, I be- 
lieve, more deeply on many minds than they 
ever tell; it is not the whimperers who feel it 
most, but patient and quiet souls. It oppressed 
the grave and reverent mind of Darwin, and 
seemed to him 'a strong argument against the 
existence of an intelligent First Cause.' ^ With 
Darwin the problem was largely that of the 
meaning of suffering in the animal world; but 
into that question I do not propose to enter 
here, not that I do not feel there is a mystery 

^ Life and Letters, ii. 311. 

^ 55 



56 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

there (which, if by some exaggerated beyond 
the facts, is by others too easily dismissed), 
but because it hardly comes within the com- 
ment of personal experience which is our topic 
in these pages. The problem of human suffer- 
ing calls for our consideration as a part of 
that experience, and it may be enough to deal 
here only with it. 

Surely it is unnecessary to awaken the mind 
to realise how real the problem is, and I shall 
not here indulge in any pictorial description of 
the spectacle of suffering. A comfortable op- 
timism may minimise it, pointing out — what 
doubtless is true — that there are in the world 
a far greater number of persons happy than 
there are afflicted; while another type of tem- 
perament will find all life lying in the dark 
shadow of suffering, and build up a philosophy 
of pessimism. It is enough for our present 
purpose to say, without accepting either ex- 
treme, that indubitably there is in the world 
an amount of sorrow and pain and wrong suffi- 
cient to challenge any facile faith. We hardly 
dare, indeed, to think how great and how 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 57 

poignant It Is. Our imaginations simply skate 
over the surface Ice of human woe. To plumb 
Its nether deeps would break the heart. To 
pursue the Investigation In some cases only a 
little way Is to feel faith becoming chilled to 
the marrow. Instinctively we shut our eyes 
to much of this side of life; but when we really 
look at it, the problem of faith is indisputable. 

It Is a problem to discuss which abstractly 
is of little use. Pain is essentially a personal 
thing — a thing in the personal experience of 
individuals. It is not, therefore, the place of 
pain in the scheme of the universe we must 
consider, but the place of pain in men's and 
women's lives. To this, then, I turn at once. 
I think we shall find things here which, if they 
do not solve the problem — for that, as I shall 
say before the chapter closes, something more 
must be added — at least illuminate it. 

In the first place, we find that suffering in 
human lives is, in the most real sense, part of 
these lives. What I mean is this. When a 
child first encounters the fact of pain he resents 
It as external. Intrusive, unnecessary, alien. He 



58 



THE FACTS OF LIFE 



does not accept it as any necessary part of life. 
It is something simply to be avoided. But, 
gradually as we grow older, we come to see 
that the element of suffering is more than this. 
It is not something obstructive among the fac- 
tors of human life, but is itself one of the very 
greatest of these factors — an integral element 
of both physical and moral existence. In phys- 
ical evolution a painful struggle is the very law 
of existence ; and, in higher forms of life, pain 
— as I shall say more particularly immediately 
— splays an even more important part. To ob- 
ject to pain, therefore, is not to object to some 
alien thing which has got into life, as a needle 
gets into the finger; it is to object to the very 
fibre and tissue of life itself. This may not 
seem very important; but it is important, for 
it suggests that our true attitude to this ele- 
ment in life is not to try to deny it or eliminate 
it (as the Christian Scientist would do), but 
to understand what is its function. 

A second thing about pain which experience 
teaches us to observe makes this clearer. We 
cannot but discover from life that pain in- 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 59 

creases as life becomes higher. This is not 
what we should expect, and It Is certainly not 
what we should have chosen; but it is so. 
Nature evolves physically, and highly organ- 
ised creatures feel more pain than do the lower. 
It evolves to consciousness and to reason, and 
man has sufferings to which the brute Is a 
stranger.^ It evolves spiritually, and the artist 
and still more the saint can know agonies of 
soul which the low-minded and worldly man 
is spared. And one must with reverence add 
that He whom we call the Perfect Man was 
the Man of Sorrows, and His crown was a 
crown of thorns. I do not forget in saying 
this that, as human life becomes higher, its 
joy also Increases. Still, It Is not otherwise 
than through suffering that these higher joys 
are reached. And they involve, too, keener 
pains; if the purest joy of purest souls is love, 
nothing suffers as love can suffer. This, then, 
is a second thing which experience shows us 
about this difficult element In life — it is not 

'"- This is one of the facts often forgotten in statements of the 
problem of suflfering in the animal world. 



6o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

merely an integral part of life but a part which, 
far from being discarded, is, on the contrary, 
developed as life attains to higher things. 

These two things, however true, do not help 
us much in the problem for faith till they are 
linked to a third thing about the fact of suffer- 
ing which experience teaches us even more 
clearly. Here I must be allowed to start from 
the premiss — which surely it is not necessary 
to argue in these pages — that man's true life 
and destiny are in character. Whenever we 
accept this — which, one may remark, at once 
puts out of court all the criticism of pain which 
is simply the chagrin of a thwarted hedonism 
— experience at once comes forward to tell us 
that no one other thing in life carves and 
chastens the moral character in man as suffer- 
ing does. This must not be said in any spirit 
of forced and false asceticism. The idea that 
pain is a good is a dogma of mediaevalism or 
heathenism, and is neither supported by a sane 
philosophy nor corroborated by experience. 
What experience tells us is not any theory of 
pain as good, but the fact of life that char- 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 6i 

acter reaches its crown and completion only 
through the tests of this discipline. No earnest 
and candid mind can look carefully at life with- 
out perceiving this, and without recognising 
that there is nothing which deepens the mind, 
cleanses the heart, and chastens the whole spir- 
itual being of man as suffering does — either 
his own suffering or that of others which he 
makes his own by sympathy. Indeed, does not 
human character seem to need this element in 
experience if it is to attain Its highest?^ Is 
it not true that a life — other than a child's — 
which knew only happiness and sunshine would 
almost Inevitably become an Ignoble life? Nie- 
mand wird ohne Leiden geadelt — without sor- 
rows no one becomes noble. This is true not 
only of the more distinctively moral or re- 
ligious side of character, but also of art and 
of love. I do not say that suffering always 
makes the mind or heart or character noble. 
There are many facts in life which disprove 

^ I recall the late Pastor von Bodelschwink — the founder of 
the great Colonie Bethel (for epileptics and other sufferers) at 
Bielefeld, Germany, once saying to me in the face of that 
spectacle of affliction: 'But there is not more than we need.' 



62 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

that. In generalising about life one must never 
let oneself forget that humanity is not an ab- 
stract generalisation, but is composed of indi- 
viduals, and that individuals differ. In many 
cases suffering deadens rather than illumines 
the mind, and embitters rather than purifies 
the heart, and even demeans rather than en- 
nobles the character. Still, this does not alter 
the broad fact of the great work which this 
dark element in experience does, as is witnessed 
to alike by some of the greatest things in lit- 
erature and some of the deepest things in life. 
Into the witness of literature on this subject 
I cannot possibly enter, and shall say of it here 
only one thing, that it is not by any means con- 
lined to Christian or even specifically religious 
writers, but, on the contrary, finds its most 
notable illustrations in classics written purely 
from the human and secular standpoint. Look 
— for but a moment — at the great Greek dram- 
atists. The problem of suffering is continually 
before iEschylus and Sophocles and Euripides. 
They offer no solution of it, but all of them 
find it — in at least some aspects — both mean- 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 63 

Ingful and moral. For i^schylus It Is pri- 
marily retributive, but, in addition, it is edu- 
cative too, and he preaches 'the sure ordinance 
that by suffering shalt thou learn.' ^ Sophocles 
— Vho saw life steadily and saw It whole' — 
is too reasonable to maintain the retribution 
theory at the expense of facts, and dwells 
rather on the way In which the mind Is en- 
lightened and the character chastened through 
discipline and pain; thus. In what Is the most 
appalling case of unmerited suffering in litera- 
ture, QEdipus is purged of his earlier faults, 
and is made (in the later play bearing his 
name) a new man because of all the unspeak- 
able agony he has had to bear. But Sophocles 
sees more than this. He sees how human suf- 
fering Is working out wide and great purposes, 
beyond the sufferer. In history and for hu- 
manity; thus the martyrdom of Philoctetes is 
ordained for great ends In Troy, and the sacri- 
fice of Antigone, whose dying word is that she 
suffers because she *feared to cast away the fear 
of Heaven,'^ Is for the exhibition and vindi- 

'^ Agamemnon, i88 sqq. ^Antigone, 943. 



64 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

eating of the law of the higher life. And even 
Euripides — 'most tragic of poets/ in whose 
dramas the contending forces of existence are 
least reconciled — feels the same truth, and in 
his most tragic pages; even Hecuba, who, 
amid the dire fate of the Trojan women, can 
see at first 'nothing, nothing but the rod of 
mine affliction,' discerns presently how God has 
'turned us in His hand' and 'all is well' and 
'our wrong an everlasting splendour.'^ Thus 
— though I have Insulted so fine a theme by 
so momentary a glance — do these supreme 
writers of the old pre-Christian time all find 
the morality and the meaning that are some- 
where in the fact of suffering. 

And what literature thus so greatly teaches, 
how deeply and surely does life confirm, show- 
ing us one by one that the discipline of sorrow 
and suffering Is just the very thing our moral 
and spiritual character simply could not have 
done without. This Is not a mere pietism; it 
is a fact of experience If anything Is. The 
present writer — if he may be pardoned the 

2 Troades, 1240 sqq. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 65 

personal reference — has had It said to him not 
once or twice but many times, In almost these 
very words, by persons of widely different 
characters; and his experience In this is only 
what any one could give who has had any 
occasion to come into more Intimate contact 
with human lives. And again and again we 
may observe It for ourselves. We see how 
some loss or pain Is not a mere negation In 
our own or other^s lives, but Is really 

'a part, 
And that a needful part, In making up 
The calm existence which is mine when I 
Am worthy of myself.'^ 

Or we say of It more simply — and the more 
simply this kind of thing Is said the better^ — 
with the old psalmist: Tt Is good for me that 
I have been afflicted.' As life goes on, a great 
many people come to see this In at least their 
own lives. To see It In the lives of others Is 

1 Wordsworth's Prelude, bk. i. 

2 When it is said at length and self-consciously (as in Mr. 
A. C. Benson's Rod and Staff) it produces a dubious effect on 
the reader. 



66 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

often not so clear; but we may be not meant 
to hold the key of any life but our own. 

Now, if this be true, what does it mean? It 
means this at least, that the element of pain 
and loss in human life is not a meaningless 
thing, and that, indeed, it is essentially a moral 
thing. This is really a great position, if we 
can attain it. The bitterest thing in pain and 
loss is that it is all mere chance — mere un- 
meaning accident. It is this, for example, which 
adds the last bitter drop to the confirmed 
pessimism of one of the most powerful of liv- 
ing English novelists. Mr. Hardy is constantly 
making us feel how by some little trifle — the 
merest chance or accident — happiness is baffled 
and the souls and lives of men and women 
doomed. In some of his outspoken poems he 
expresses this as a definite view of pain in 
the world, as in the following lines, entitled 
*Hap': 

*If but some vengeful god would call to me 
From out the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing, 
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 
That thy love's loss Is my hate's profiting!" 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 6^ 

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die, 
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; 
Half eased in that a Povverfuller than I 
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, 
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 
— Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain. 
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. 
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'^ 

Mr. Hardy is an author whose darkest pages 
are to be read with a certain respect, for his 
is not a cheap cynicism but a sincere, if a 
mordant, unfaith. But I do not think a sonnet 
such as the above is the true account of the 
element of suffering In life, when life is looked 
over in some long stretch — and life cannot be 
truly seen except in long stretches — or the true 
echo of what most men feel about their greatest 
sorrows. The smaller pains and losses of life 
suggest this thought of mere bad hap. But 
life's great sorrows and afflictions suggest 
otherwise. As has been finely said, *les dou- 
leurs passageres blasphement et accusent le del; 

^ Wessex Poems, p. 7. 



6S THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Igs grandes doiileiirs n^accusent ni ne hlasphe- 
ment; elles ecoulent/^ 

This, then, I think is the great comment of 
experienpe on the problem of pain — that suf- 
fering is a meaningful thing, accomplishing 
moral ends. And this, therefore, is the 
changed attitude to the problem into which 
experience leads us — it bids us, instead of criti- 
cising and complaining, rather listen and learn. 

But our problem is far from solved; indeed 
it is, at its most crucial point, not yet touched. 
For there is another broad comment of ex- 
perience upon pain, and this intensifies instead 
of relieving the enigma. 

Nothing is more apparent to the observant 
and sympathetic mind in connection with human 
suffering than its often sheer injustice. Here 
is the real cnix of the challenge to faith in this 
matter, and the more we see of life the more 
keenly is this felt. A man, truly taught by 
experience, will not say his own sufferings are 
unjust; on the contrary, he will say that God 
has not dealt with him according to his sins 

1 A. de Musset, Confession d'un enfant du Steele, ill, ii. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 69 

nor rewarded him according to his iniquities. 
But as he looks at the suffering world his heart 
is often pierced with the appalling wrong in it. 
Think of but a single aspect of it. Think of 
the sufferings of thousands of helpless and in- 
nocent little children, whose lives from their 
birth are a daily appeal for a justice which 
seems to have no ear in earth or heaven. Con- 
siderations about moral development do not 
apply here. A child's character needs happi- 
ness, not anguish. And the child does not 
deserve it. A bad man deserves it, but not 
his innocent child. Yet a man is vicious, and 
his child bears the penalty. The thing is un- 
just. We say of it as the people of Israel 
said of it In the days of Ezeklel; 'The way 
of the Lord Is not equal.' It is not irreverence 
that says this; it is the finest ethical Instinct 
of our nature. Here the Christian thought of 
God's love and righteousness seems to meet a 
shriek of contradiction — or. In the pleading 
eyes and wan faces of the little children of 
whom I spoke, a silent condemnation severer 
still. We recall a happy little child whom 



70 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Jesus once placed in the midst of His disciples 
to teach them a lesson of faith. There are 
in this world other little children, and when 
we place them in our midst our faith is simply 
struck dumb. 

This, I say again, is the acutest part of the 
whole problem — a part which experience seems 
to do nothing to ameliorate. It is a difficulty 
which sinks very deep into the mind of many 
people — especially, I believe, many women. 
Sometimes it is said that women have not a 
good capacity for justice: that may or may 
not be. But they certainly have a keen sense 
of injustice. It is a woman's pen which, faced 
with this problem, wrote, as with a flame: 
'There is no justice.'^ 

Well, but we must look into it, not with the, 
flame of anger but with the light of reason. 
There is a mental habit which is always salu- 
tary and is never more useful than when one 
is shut up to a difficulty — namely, to think out- 
what is involved in the alternative. Let us 
employ that method here. The problem is 

1 Olive Schreiner's Times and Seasons, 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 71 

that, when a man does evil, not only he but 
others who are Innocent are involved in suffer- 
ing. But think what it would mean if this 
were not so. That would mean that the man's 
life is something isolated from all other lives, 
terminating in itself. It would mean, in short, 
that each man lives to himself, and that we are 
not members one of another. Does any think- 
ing person desire that this should be the law 
of human life? It would not only impoverish 
life; it would extinguish it in any real and rich 
sense. It would make impossible the whole 
progress of humanity from age to age and 
race to race and man to man. What is it 
which makes the riches and reality, even the 
very meaning, of life? It is not what each 
man has merited, earned, achieved. It is, far 
more, what he has inherited and received from 
others. Without this solidarity in the life of 
humanity our life would be unthinkable. We 
must remember this great law or fact of soli- 
darity when we are questioning the justice of 
God in the problem before us. 

John Stuart Mill in his essay on Nature (one 



72 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

of his three famous Essays on Religion) lays 
down the extraordinary proposition that, if 
God were omnipotent, the just law for Him 
to enforce would be that 'each person's share 
of suffering and happiness would be exactly 
proportioned to that person's good or evil 
deeds, and no human being would have a worse 
lot than another without worse deserts.' Well, 
this is a strange and difficult world in which 
we live; but, after all, I am thankful to live 
in the world I do rather than in the world 
Mill would thus organise in the name of justice. 
He would indeed, as Charlotte Bronte once 
said of him, *make a hard, dry, dismal world 
of it' My lot in life reduced to what is ex- 
actly proportioned to my individual deeds 
would leave me morally and intellectually in 
absolute starvation. It is others' great and 
good deeds — others' moral triumphs, others' 
intellectual conquests — which have made my 
life a life at all. And if no human being should 
have a worse lot than another without worse 
desert, then no human being should have a 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 73 

better lot without better desert. What desert 
then had Mill to the advantage of culture and 
civilisation which a poor prehistoric savage 
was denied, though his claim, 'exactly propor- 
tioned to that person's good or evil deeds,' may- 
have been quite as good as that of a modern 
philosopher's? We cannot run the idea of 
justice on the lines of this false individualism. 
Mill would be quite right if man were an iso- 
lated unit. But man is not an isolated unit: 
science, philosophy, religion, and experience 
all combine to repudiate that figment of the 
doctrinaire.^ 'We are members one of an- 
other.' We live together and progress to- 
gether and sin together and suffer together. 
Our life is personal because it is not only in- 

^That science (in its doctrine of heredity) and also religion 
and experience attest the idea of solidarity in the conception 
of humanity is clear; but it is not so clear as regards philoso- 
phy, which may seem — in, for example, such typical thinkers 
as Augustine in the Middle Ages and Descartes, the 'father 
of modern philosophy' — to emphasise rather the relatedness of 
personality to itself or what we call self-consciousness. But 
the greatest philosophical masters have realised that self- 
consciousness is more than individual. Aristotle, who de- 



74 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

dividual but also organic. It is the greatest 
law of humanity, and without it the very word 
humanity would have no meaning. To repeal 
it would not be justice ; it would be an end to 
life In any human sense of the word. And 
surely no thinking person will suggest that it 
might be repealed as regards evil, while re- 
tained as regards good. This will not bear 
any scrutiny. We saw, In the last chapter, how 
disadvantageous for morality would be a world 
with one set of neutral laws for virtue and 
another for vice. Nature metes out Its re- 
wards to men Impartially — that Is to say, 
justly. When evil consequences follow, It Is not 
because the law — or the law-giver — Is unjust; 

scribed man as a being 'essentially social' (Pol. i. 2), kept 
hold of the idea all through his system, especially in the 
intimate connection he established between ethics and politics. 
Similarly Plato, writing really on human nature and 'how to 
live best,' called his work The Republic because the best life 
is essentially social. Again, Kant in the third — the most 
difficult and least known — of his Critiques, emphasises that 
existence is an organism, the parts of which can be understood 
not as existing by themselves or for their own sake, but as a 
whole, each part of which is also part of the rest. This is an 
important element in Kant's doctrine of personality, which has 
been neglected by expositors. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 75 

It is because men's deeds have been evll.^ Eze- 
kiel's reply In the name of God to the people 
who murmured that 'the way of the Lord Is 
not equal' is true: 'Is not my way equal? are 
not your ways unequal?'^ There are, as I 
admitted at the outset, aspects of the problem 
of suffering which are distinguishable from the 
problem of sin; but In the end to this deeper 
and darker mystery we are thrown back. 

And yet can we leave the question of suffer- 
ing and pass to that of sin with merely such a 
cold philosophic word as solidarity? That 
word does illumine the problem to some ex- 
tent; but, after all, human suffering Is not a 
problem of philosophy; it Is a problem of 
persons — of lives rather than of life. When 
you have said all that your wise philosophy 
can say about suffering, still the sufferers re- 
main. Sit in a darkened room beside some one 

^ I admit this does not meet the problem of the unmerited 
suffering occasioned by great natural calamities. But the un- 
swerving operation of the great forces of nature can be chal- 
lenged only by a wisdom which can judge a universe or a 
folly which forgets it cannot. 

2 Ezekiel xviii. 25. The whole chapter shows how old are 
nur 'modern' problems. 



76 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

who is racked with pain, and your doctrine of 
solidarity is a poor support to your faith in a 
good God. We have not faced the real chal- 
lenge of pain to the soul till we have faced 
this — faced it in the cruellest concrete of the 
actual agony of a personal life. I have said 
(at the close of the previous chapter) that it 
is always easy to generalise. It is easy to gen- 
eralise even about the problem of pain. It is 
not easy to repeat your fine moral generalisa- 
tions before a living soul — man or woman or 
child — who is being riven with helpless anguish. 
That no one may say I am slipping through this 
topic on generalisations, I shall quote the fol- 
lowing picture of what pain really is from a 
modern novel of exceptional truthfulness : — 

'When he returned to the sick-room, the child 
was in convulsions. He stood and watched It, as 
though he would kill himself with the sight; these 
small clenched hands, white with bluish nails ; these 
staring eyes, almost rolling out of their sockets ; this 
distorted mouth, and the little teeth grinding like 
iron against a stone — oh, it was terrible, and yet 
this was not the worst. No, when the convulsions 
ceased and the little body, growing soft and flexible 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 77 

again, abandoned Itself to the joy of the lesser pain 
— the fear that came into the child's eyes when it 
dimly perceived that the pain was returning, the 
beseeching appeals for help as the torture came 
nearer and nearer ; oh, to see all this and be power- 
less to help, help even with his heart's blood, with 
everything that he possessed ! He raised his clenched 
fist threatingly to heaven, he seized the child with 
an insane idea of flight, and then, flinging himself 
upon his knees, he prayed to the God in heaven, who 
holds the earth in subjection by means of trials and 
discipline, who sends need and sickness, suffering 
and death, who wills that every knee be bent in fear 
and trembling, from whom no flight is possible — 
either to the uttermost seas or the nethermost depths 
— to Him, the God, who, if it pleases Him, tram- 
ples upon the heart we love best in the world and 
tortures it beneath His foot until it is once more 
the dust of which He created it. 

'With such thoughts did Niels Lyhne pray to 
God, and, casting himself helplessly before the 
throne of heaven, acknowledge that His was the 
power and His alone. 

'But the child's sufferings continued.'^ 

^ Niels Lyhne, by J. P. Jacobsen, ch. xiil. (E. T., Siren 
Voices, p. 261). Jacobsen was a Danish writer of remarkable 
genius who died of consumption in 1885 at the age of thirty- 
six, leaving to literature only a fragment of what he might 
have done. 



78 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

This Is from a novel, but It Is not fiction. 
There Is our problem of pain In the concrete, 
and before It our line talk about the moral 
character of suffering and about the great law 
of human solidarity are a kind of blasphemy. 
The cruelty — and to a child — Is so undeniable 
that the problem Is unendurable. The mind 
which is sincere Is simply silent before It. The 
philosopher's generalisations falter, and only 
the professional pietist, babbling about all be- 
ing for the best, keeps on talking. His ob- 
servations are highly admirable. But even 
faith Is almost ashamed of them. It Is better 
to say nothing. There is simply nothing to 
be said. 

No, there is absolutely nothing more to be 
said about the facts — these brutal and des- 
perate facts. And It Is no help to believe that 
in the end It will all be made clear — to think 
of God as holding, as It were in an envelope, 
the explanation of the mystery to be given to 
us some future day. That may and does suf- 
fice for some of the pains and problems of life; 
but it does not suffice when the sword pierces 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 79 

the heart and twists itself therein. A God 
who Is to be the explanation of things is not 
enough here. The poor father's heart, torn 
with suffering with his tortured child, has some- 
thing in It greater than this coldly wise and 
watching Deity with His final reason for every- 
thing. There is no light whatever to be shed 
on such a problem as this along lines such as 
these. The solution is not any attempted In- 
tellectual construction of the facts, and not 
even a faith that God holds their Intellectual 
solution. It Is deeper than that. It Is a new 
thought of God — of God as love. 

How shall love act In face of facts or suffer- 
ing such as have just been described? Nothing 
is sorer to watch than to see a little child suffer. 
All the love In the human heart Is moved to 
suffer too. If this be nowhere In God, then 
the Impassibility of the Almighty Creator is 
a less noble thing than the sympathy of the 
impotent creature. But if, on the other hand, 
God Is not One who stands apart from human 
suffering, even though holding the explanation 
of it In His hand, but One who Himself comes 



8o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

into it and shares it, that were a thought of 
God upon which faith could stand in any 
anguish. That character in God, that passion 
in God would be faith's deliverance. It would 
not, I repeat, intellectually answer the question 
of suffering. But you cannot arraign a God 
who Himself suffers too. 

Such a thought of God as this — is it more 
than a vain and indeed inappropriate phan- 
tasy? It is spurned by great thinkers of old 
and of to-day. We all know those lines of 
Lucretius, which have never ceased to resound 
within the human mind, which picture Deity 
as in its very essence unmoved, untouched, 
untroubled — 'privata dolore omni/ removed 
from human grief — ^semota a rebus nostris/ 
remote from our concerns.^ In our own day. 
Dr. Eucken bids us reject all idea of a God 
who takes our misery upon Himself as 'a de- 
cidedly wrong note.'^ Well, there is little use 
discussing this as an idea of poetry or philos- 
ophy, ancient or modern. It is something 

- De Rerum Natura, ii. 648-9. 
2 Truth of Religion, p. 433. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 8i 

quite beyond the power of the mind to project 
for Itself. It simply stands or falls with the 
thought of God which is revealed in the fact 
of Jesus Christ. If in some most real sense 
God was in Christ — the Christ who was ac- 
quainted with grief, who bore our sufferings 
and carried our sorrows — then and then only 
does that thought of God of which I have 
spoken take real shape and strength in the 
mind. I desire to remember it must be said 
with care and reverence that God thus suffers 
too, and not so much because it borders on an 
ancient heresy — some heresies become ortho- 
dox in time — but because we must never forget 
how infinitely God transcends our nature. Yet 
it is no unworthy thought of the Father of 
our spirits that He can suffer as also rejoice 
with His children. But, assuredly, mere think- 
ing about life cannot say it; if it be said at all, 
it is only In Christ. 

In a later chapter I shall discuss whether 
the view of Christ involved in this be real and 
credible. Meanwhile let us ask, in closing this 
chapter, how, even if such a thought of God 



82 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

be true, does it help? Certainly it does not 
alter the poignant facts. Despite even this 
thought of God, 'the child's sufferings con- 
tinued.' Yet such a thought of God makes all 
the difference. The difference Is not merely 
the negative one that it quiets our murmuring 
to see that supreme One in the same case. 
This aspect of It has been sympathetically ex- 
pressed by the pen of Mr. Balfour: — 

'If they suffer, did not He, on their account, 
suffer also? If suffering falls not always on the 
most guilty, was not He innocent? Shall they 
cry aloud that the world Is ill-arranged, when He, 
for their sakes, subjected Himself to their condi- 
tions?'^ 

This is true, yet It is but a little of the truth. 
Something far deeper and tenderer and more 
experimental Is needed when the soul is really 
In straits. It Is not merely that Christ, too, 
had His pains to endure; it Is that He bears 
our pains with us. And thus the sufferer dis- 
traught with his own agonies or those of his 
loved ones (which are harder to bear and far 
harder to understand than his own) Is, to 

1 A. J. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, p. 352. 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 83 

quote the fine words of the spiritual mind of 
Dora Greenwell, 'met from the eyes and brows 
of Him who was indeed acquainted with grief, 
by a look of solemn recognition such as may 
pass between friends who have endured be- 
tween them some strange and sacred sorrow 
and are through it united in a bond that cannot 
be broken.* ^ I shall not multiply words about 
this. It is not by eloquent writing upon it that 
it is brought home to the soul as spiritual truth. 
It is only as you take your cross of agony to 
His Cross, who means for us the very heart 
of God, and there learn — even with the sword 
piercing your life or the life of your dearest — 
to know God nearer than ever before. This 
is what makes all the difference for faith. It 
does not explain the mystery. It does not re- 
move the facts. But it makes all the difference 
if we hear in the darkness — and speaking with 
that peculiar tenderness w^hich a loving voice 
takes into its tone in the darkness — a voice 
saying : 

*0 heart I made, a heart beats here.' 
^ Colloquia Crucis, p. 14. 



84 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Then — not till then — can we accept God's will 
even at the worst. Indeed, we would not have, 
for ourselves or for others, anything else than 
the will of that God who feels and suffers too. 
His will is indeed — even when it is uttered pain 
— our peace. 

Some one will say that people often imagine 
in the dark that they hear voices. That is 
true, and I repeat we must discuss in a future 
chapter whether such a faith can be verified 
in the cold daylight of historical criticism. 
Meanwhile on this I shall say but one word. 
Does not every one of us practically regard 
the suffering love of Jesus Christ as indeed 
the love and sympathy of God Himself? For 
why is it that we do not find here the final 
arraignment of the divine goodness? Why is 
it that this unparalleled suffering, unjustly in- 
flicted on the most innocent, does not make us 
more than ever unbelievers? Why does it not 
awaken tears of pity and a torrent of protest 
against God? Because — this is the one reason 
— dimly we all discern in this passion more than 
a human tragedy. Because we feel, however 



THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 85 

falterlngly, that here, In a way we cannot de- 
fine but cannot dismiss, Is the love of God 
suffering for and with men. That Is the final 
word on the problem of pain: It is enough 
for faith. 

And so to conclude we may, I think, say this 
about It all. We may say that the mystery of 
suffering, while difficult and, to many minds, 
oppressive, still Is not a problem which In the 
end silences faith, and for this reason, that the 
more deeply we look into pain in human life 
the more we can find God in it. We find In 
it God's moral purpose and work In character; 
we find God's great and just laws of life be- 
tween man and man; we find, at the last and 
worst, God suffering too. We cannot explain 
pain, but if we thus find God within It, then 
p faith is not put to shame. 

But, behind this problem, is a darker one of 
which we cannot speak thus. 



Ill 

THE ATHEISTIC FACT 



'What you are now saying/ I suggested, 'seems to 
imply the existence of two original and almost equal 
powers. It sounds very like Manichaeism.' 

*So,' returned he quietly, *I have been sometimes told, 
but the days for me are long past (if indeed for me 
they ever existed) when a word or a name could alarm 
me. I have learned to hold with Newman that one of 
the surest marks of a living faith is its disregard of 
consequences, and among all Butler's deep sayings there 
are no words which I endorse more fully than those in 
which he bids us know that, if a truth be once estab- 
lished, objections are nothing — the one being founded 
on our knoweldge, the other on our ignorance.' 

DORA GREENWELL. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ATHEISTIC FACT 

This age, which Is sensitive to the spectacle of 
suffering, is one which, in many respects, hardly 
realises sin as a problem at all. Sir Oliver 
Lodge tells us that 'the higher man of to-day 
is not worrying' about it. Well, if this be the 
right point of view it must be remarked, in the 
first place, that a good deal both of the teach- 
ing and also of the life of One whom we have 
been accustomed to think of as the Highest 
Man of any day was a mistake or at least an 
exaggeration, and It seems a pity that Jesus 
should have died for sin Instead of simply dis- 
missing It. 

There Is, however, nothing particularly high 
In dealing with things other than as they really 
are. The question Is whether sin Is a fact of 
life, and a fact so great as rightly to trouble 
the conscience and the mind. If It Is, we ought 

89 



90 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to 'worry' about it; to say of it, with Renan, 
je le supprime is not high but only shallow. 
Now it is an easy thing to regard sin as a not 
very difficult or deadly problem for either life 
or faith so long as we deal with it in an ab- 
stract way. Nothing, indeed, is easier than to 
make a number of facile observations about 
the 'negative' element in existence and so on, 
and to disguise what sin is under these semi- 
philosophical generalities. Here, again, it is 
so easy to generalise. But no man who looks 
straight at the facts of life — his own life or 
the life of the world of men — can be content 
to treat the matter thus. Think for a little 
what sin is and what it does. There are times 
when not to worry over sin seems the counsel of 
everything about us. On some fine morning, 
when the sun is bright and the air is fresh and 
the world is beautiful, it seems morbid even to 
name sin. But, as a matter of actual fact, on 
what falsenesses and foulnesses in human 
hearts and lives has the glorious sun dawned, 
what base and bad lives will breathe its divine 
air, what scenes of shame and unkindness and 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 91 

cruelty and wickedness will be enacted even on 
this day of beauty. This is not morbid imagin- 
ing; it is the barest fact. Not to worry over it 
is no sign of height of mind; certainly to feel 
the burden of it is no sign of a low mind. 
Every man with a heart and a conscience knows 
that the problem here is the darkest problem 
of the world's history and also the final issue 
within his own being. 

Moreover, to faith It presents a problem 
which is peculiarly acute — one much more acute 
than any problem of pain. It is not for noth- 
ing that the facts of sin are so little faced and 
that the topic is so often dealt with in evasive 
generalities. For to any faith — philosophic as 
well as religious — it Is unwelcome to a degree 
which makes the mind want to do anything 
rather than face It as It really is. Why this is 
so can be stated in a sentence. In the problem 
of pain, despite many and great perplexities, 
we found that the more we pressed into it the 
more was it possible to discern God in it. But 
the more we look into sin the more impossible 
do we find it to associate It with God. Its very 



92 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

definition In the conscience Is something 'against 
Thee.' In short, suffering, while a difficult fact, 
is yet a divine fact; but sin is not less than the 
one atheistic fact in the world. 

One is well aware how hopelessly orthodox 
this sounds to the philosophic ear. A philos- 
ophy of evil to-day hardly calls itself such 
unless it treats sin as a phase in the moral 
evolution, and as thus a part — an intelligible 
and necessary part — of the scheme of things. 
I think I may claim to be not insensible to the 
attraction of this as a system of thought. But 
the reason why I, for one, remain hopelessly 
orthodox on this topic is simply that I have 
never been able to find in this way of thinking 
any real statements of the facts about sin as 
these actually exist in the world without or 
within. I read Spinoza on evil.^ As a struc- 
ture of philosophy his system Is infinitely more 
attractive to the mind of any one at all In- 
fluenced by the idea of the philosophic demand 
for synthesis than is, say, Augustine's. But In 
Spinoza are hardly any of the facts about sin 

'^Ethics, pt. iv. passim. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 93 

as I know them In life, while In Augustine these 
are there In all their Intractable truth. Spinoza 
and Augustine, discussing the topic, are like 
men not only of differing views but Inhabiting 
different planets. The question Is which view 
Is truer to the facts of this planet, not which 
Is more acceptable to the philosophic temper. 
It Is from this point of view I shall consider 
the matter In this chapter, which must be, I am 
afraid, not such a light one as some modern 
theologians are able to produce even on this 
dark topic. 

Philosophers of moral evil such as I have 
Indicated vary in method and In terminology, 
but all agree in one essential feature. Whether 
metaphysical or dialectical or materialistic, they 
agree in treating sin as a phenomenon of the 
natural world. Nature Is the supreme category 
of the modern mind. Man Is part of this na- 
ture. Everything In man. Including the moral 
phenomena of what is called sin, is regarded 
as In and of the system and order of the natural 
sphere. Sin, in other words. Is and must be 
natural. That Is not to say it is not to be 



94 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

resisted and transcended; but It Is to say It Is 
a fact of natural existence and not absurd or 
an anomaly. Thus the eminent English scien- 
tific philosopher whom I have named — and for 
whose work In imbuing a thoroughly scientific 
outlook on the universe with profoundly spir- 
itual conceptions I wish to speak in terms of 
sincere and respectful appreciation — says sin 
Is 'akin to dirt, to disease and weeds;' and 
again, that 'the contrast between good and evil 
can be well illustrated by the contrast between 
heat and cold,' adding 'there is nothing evil 
about cold itself.'^ 

Let us examine this by the standard not of 
orthodoxy but of experience. Has it any kind 
of support in what In our own lives we find 
sin to be? Let a man with a clear mind and 
a candid conscience examine some sin in his 
life. He has, for example, told a base He, or 
committed an act of sensuality, or has been 
unkind and selfish. To tell this man that his 
bad conscience for his having been untrue or 

1 Sir Oliver Lodge's Man and the Universe, p. 242 ; Sub- 
stance of Faith allied nvith Science, p. 48. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 95 

Impure or unloving may be 'well illustrated' by 
his feeling cold on some winter day is just to 
trifle with and even mock everything real in 
his moral being. The comparison is absolutely 
irrelevant. You might just as well compare 
his sin to the Differential Calculus or the Battle 
of Waterloo or Tariff Reform or any other 
thing your fancy fixes on. These many natural 
facts have simply no point of contact with the 
moral facts of experience in a man who has 
sinned. Indeed, if we take them to the test of 
some classical example of the sense of sin their 
irrelevance reaches the point of indecency. I 
shall not take any strained or morbid cases of 
w^hat the author of the Varieties of Religious 
Experience^ calls 'the sick soul.' I shall take 
two of the shortest and simplest and sanest 
confessions of sin possible — utterances which 
can be echoed in any honest experience. Take 
the psalmist's 'Against Thee, Thee only, have 
I sinned;' then say (if you can get your lips 

1 The fault of James's interesting and valuable book is that 
it deals too much with extreme cases and does not build 
enough on the data of normal religious experience. Truth is 
best found on the highways of life. 



96 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to say it) that a good illustration of this and 
similar utterances in the fifty-first Psalm would 
be when a man, in the heats and chills of a 
fever, says his temperature sank last night 
below normal. Take the apostle who bowed 
his head in shame before Jesus with the words : 
'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 

Lord;* then say (again if you can) that this 
is, so to speak, as if some one who had fallen 
into a filthy bog should tell a lady in a white 
dress that she must not come too near to him. 

1 am not going to waste space in arguing about 
this. A man's experience needs no arguments 
to show that the kind of 'sin' which is illustrated 
by the thermometer or akin to dirt is not in the 
remotest degree like, is not in the same world 
with, the sin he knows in his heart and con- 
science. It is purely a fancy article of a phi- 
losophy which has forgotten the facts of life. 

This, then, is the first thing which experience 
tells us about sin, that it is a phenomenon not 
of what we call the natural, but of another 
class and order which we call the moral. Now, 
certainly, the natural world and the moral are 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 97 

not to be isolated from one another. They are 
related to one another and touch one another. 
Particularly do they meet in man, who is a 
member of both. But they must not be con- 
fused with one another, nor are the categories 
of the one to be applied to the other. The 
moral realm possesses — or rather, one should 
say, is constituted by — one fundamental cate- 
gory, of which nature simply knows nothing. 
The difference between right and wrong, which 
is the constituent category of morals, is a differ- 
ence, which is destroyed when it is classed with 
the difference, say, between 30^ and 90° Fah- 
renheit. It is a distinction absolute within itself, 
not variable with terms and seasons. It is to 
this absolute moral realm that the phenomenon 
of sin belongs, and any discussion of it which 
treats it as a phenomenon of a relative and 
neutral world is simply not a discussion of sin 
at all. 

One other way of treating the topic on the 
part of those whom I am inclined to call the 
fanciful theologians — ^by whom I mean those 
who are out of touch with the facts or the 



98 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

subject — I may more briefly mention. They 
tell us that sin is not so much that which ought 
not to be as that which is not. It is a mere 
'negative,' a 'not being,' while good is positive 
being. What is, or was, called 'the New 
Theology' is fond of such phrases, and one 
exponent of It — a preacher not without genius 
in his spirit If only he could be delivered from 
the misapprehension of thinking It a genius for 
metaphysics — seems Inclined to adopt the 
aphorism that 'the Devil Is a vacuum.'^ Well, 
I am not competent to describe the devil, of 
whose being I know as little as even a neo- 
theologian does. But I know something of 
myself. And to tell me then sin within me is 
a 'non-existent' is a kind of sorry jest. The 
bad In me Is as real as the good. I apply to 
It every available test of reality, and find it 
existent In everything which Is most real In my 
being — thought, affection, will, habit, character. 
Indeed, if I do not take care, It will become 
my most essential self, and I may be a bad 
man In every sense In which I am a man at all. 

1 The Neiu Theology, by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, pp. 43-4. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 99 

And around me In the world I see — not that 
I judge them, but I see them — bad men as 
distinctly as good men, and badness possessing 
all the reality which any kind of life does. If 
any philosophy says sin Is a *non-exIstent,' that 
Is a saying Illuminative not of sin but only of 
the philosophy which Is so far out of touch 
with'llfe as to say It. 

On this and things like this I cannot longer 
dwell. We must pass to the problem which 
confronts us if we reject such facile theories 
of evil and face it as it really Is — the atheistic 
fact In the world. 

Do not these very words proclaim the hope- 
lessness of the problem? What can faith say 
when confronted with a fact the very definition 
of which is that It Is 'against God' — a fact, 
therefore, w^hlch cannot be made harmonious 
with God? This Is why there cannot be a 
rational philosophy of sin. All attempts to 
explain sin end in something quite different — 
the explaining of it away into something else. 
There is a distinction between these two results 
which many people w^ho write on this subject 



loo THE FACTS OF LIFE 

seem not able to appreciate. But while a final 
philosophy of sin, from its very terms, is im- 
possible, a theodicy in face of sin may be pos- 
sible; and it is this which faith is entitled to 
require. It may seem worse than useless to 
touch on so profound a question within the 
limits of what is left of this chapter; but, after 
all, it is of the greatest themes that it is true 
that many words cannot say more than few. 
I do not wish to get involved In speculative 
coils on the subject; It Is available facts about 
sin which most demand attention. For this 
reason I shall deal briefly with the highly 
speculative problem of what Is called the divine 
permission of moral evil. The main positions 
of a philosophic theodicy as to this may be 
stated thus. If we assume God as not the 
Infinite Thing but as Supreme Moral Person- 
ality — and this is at this point legitimately 
assumed, for only on this assumption does any 
need for a theodicy about evil arise — then the 
only world really worthy of Him and really 
expressive of His true Being and Character 
would be a world which Is more than a vast 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT loi 

mechanical toy but Is a world of moral persons. 
The point Is stated thus In Professor Ward's 
notable Gifford Lecture: 'God Is Love. And 
what must that world be that Is worthy of 
such love? The only worthy object of love is 
just love. It must then be a world that can 
love God.'^ It Is In the light of this considera- 
tion that philosophy considers this problem of 
the permission of sin. Would It not have been 
to destroy such a world If the possibility of 
not loving God had been shut out by the pre- 
determination of the Creator? Would not that 
have been the reducing of creation to (as Sir 
Thomas Browne, I think, phrases It) 'what it 
was on the sixth day' — to a world, that is, 
emptied of moral agents whose history is not 
merely mechanical and physical but is a history 
of ethical and spiritual freedom? Certainly 
this would have been to prevent sin ; but would 
it not also have prevented love and all mo- 
rality? For, to quote Professor Ward again — 
I quote him because he does not discuss the 
theme In the merely theological interest — 'love 

^ The Realm of Ends, ch. xx. p. 453. 



I02 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

is free: in a ready-made world, then, it could 
have no place.' Here I know the Pilate in the 
reader's mind will say: 'What is freedom?' and 
will not stay for an answer. I will not attempt 
the answer. What moral freedom is can 
hardly be analysed or even defined, because it 
is one of those ultimate and final categories 
which are not reducible to simple elements, and 
of which we can only say — as we say of right 
and, perhaps, beauty — Si non rogas, intelligo. 
But of these ultimate and final categories we 
can say some things, even to Pilate, which they 
are not. And of moral freedom we can cer- 
tainly say that it does not mean a character 
which is good because it is deprived of the 
possibility of being other than good. So if 
God's world were to be a world of moral per- 
sons, it would seem that must not mean a world 
deprived of the possibility of their being other 
than good. To have prevented this would have 
been to prevent a moral world at all — at least 
in any sense in which the word morality has 
ethical content for an experience. And that 
would be to prevent a world expressive of God 
Himself. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 103 

This reasoning and suggestion I merely out- 
line, and do not press it far. One should not 
seek to develop a logical demonstration on such 
a topic. And I pass from these abstract con- 
siderations to the more definitely historical 
questions about sin. 

The first historical question about sin ob- 
viously is the circumstances of its appearance 
in the world, but to this it is impossible to give 
a historical answer. There is no available evi- 
dence to enable us to do so. I do not suppose 
we shall be asked to-day in any seriously edu- 
cated quarter to take the stories in the opening 
chapters of Genesis as literal history, pro- 
foundly and permanently meaningful as they 
are ; and, apart from that, there is no professed 
source of information on the subject anywhere. 
One observes a tendency in some modern 
writers on this question to seek evidence from 
the story of evolution. Thus a recent Hulsean 
lecturer thinks we have the 'empirical' source 
of sin, and even necessity for it, in man's diffi- 
culty 'of enforcing his inherited organic nature 
to obey a moral law which he has only gradu- 



I04 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

ally been enabled to discern.'^ But while some 
relevant observations about evil are suggested 
from the point of view of evolution, it seems to 
me that evolution is the channel of temptation 
rather than the source of sin. That this is 
true is visible in our own lives. We to-day have 
just the difficulty referred to above of enforcing 
an inherited organic nature to obey a law we 
have gradually discerned. Every man who — 
to take no higher an instance — feels he ought 
to get up earlier in the morning, but finds his 
^inherited organic nature' unwilling to begin 
doing it, knows this ^difficulty.' Yet surely we 
know it is *one thing to be tempted' from old 
habits of the body and ^another thing to fall' 
(or, in the case suggested, not to rise I). 
Moreover, as bearing even on temptation, this 
association of the origination of evil with the 
organic nature which man has inherited is in- 
adequate and indeed inappropriate, because 
man's most characteristic sins do not arise out 
of the animal at all. Such sins as ambition or 

^Tennant's Origin and Propagation of Sin (Hulsean Lec- 
ture for 1901-2), p. 81. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 105 

pride or fraud (which Dante calls *man's pe- 
culiar vice^) are not, so to speak, a servile 
uprising in human nature, but are the crimes 
of the royalty of reason itself. For these and 
other considerations, I feel that the pursuit of 
this line by which the origin of sin is sought 
under suggestions from the story of evolution 
does not help us very much. The real origin 
of sin lies in something deeper than the clinging 
garment of our physical descent. 

If, then, in the records neither of sacred 
narrative nor of physical evolution we find the 
clue we need, where shall we seek it? The 
answer is in the grande profundum of person- 
ality. Let us here avoid all darkening with 
verbiage, for here certainly the remark made 
a moment ago is true, that many words cannot 
say more than few. The one thing to say is 
this. Man is an ego; sin is the ego become 
the egoist. A beast cannot be an egoist; it may 
seek the satisfaction of this or that desire, but 
it cannot seek itself. A personal being, know- 
ing Itself as an end, seeks, in the gratification 

1 Inferno, xi. 26. 



io6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

of its desires, not merely their satisfaction but 
the satisfaction of the self. Thus a dog drinks 
merely to slake the physical sense of thirst; a 
man often does more than that, and drinks on, 
long past the satisfaction of mere thirst, to 
attain some further satisfaction of himself in 
enjoyment or, it may be, drunkenness. It is 
this false self which is the author of sin. Thus 
to specify it is, of course, not to explain it. 
If we ask what thus perverts the idea of the 
self there is no answer. We have simply no 
data from which to construct an answer. To 
speculate about it is indeed, in Goethe's phrase, 
to be led about a barren heath by an evil spirit. 
We simply do not know the deeps of the 
mystery of our being. We call ourselves self- 
conscious — that is, self-knowing — but we are 
only superficially so. There are in human 
personality great subterranean areas into which 
we have never penetrated. There is nothing 
to be ashamed of intellectually in saying this : 
does the most confident scientist know any 
better the mystery of the atom? There are 
places where it is philosophical to confess 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 107 

ignorance and where tihe true religion is an 
agnosticism. And it is a part of true knowl- 
edge to know where knowledge stops/ 

Nows however, it will be asked where is any 
theodicy? Is it simply given up at the crucial 
point under the plea of the mystery of person- 
ality? Not so. For, w^hile personality is an 
abysmal deep which we cannot fathom, there 
arise out of it at least two clear and conclusive 
things about sin in relation to God and in re- 
lation to ourselves, and these are sufficient, if 
not to complete a theodicy — they are, I shall 
say presently, not sufficient for that — at least 
to make the arraignment of God for sin untrue 
to the facts. 

^ The theological student who wishes to ponder further over 
this matter should assimilate (which is more than merely 
read) the fundamental position of Augustine, which is that 
man's whole nature is made for God — Fecisti nos ad Te — and 
in its right state only in continued relatedness to Him. This 
applies to the self-conscious being's idea of itself as well as to 
anything else. Sin originates in the self-conscious personality, 
which can say, 'I am I,' saying it *as though it were of him- 
self.' It is thus a defectio — arising not out of the flesh but 
from pride — or, as Augustine says of the fallen angels, a 'not 
sticking fast unto God.' The value of this idea of the sinful 
will as 'deficient' appears when Augustine comes to describe 
grace, which is thus a restoring of man, including the will, 



io8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

One is this. It is something so intimately 
associated with the moral personality that it 
may be best stated in personal terms and even 
in the first person. The surest fact about sin 
in my life is just that my sin is my sin. It may 
have circumstances and conditions which are 
not mine, but it becomes sin in my conscience 
because and when it is mine. Of course, one 
is aware that the sense of this is dimmed and 
even denied for the modern mind by the con- 
sciousness of such forces in life as that of 
heredity, which apparently mortgage life, even 
moral life, so heavily and sum it up as nothing 
more than a resultant of determined conditions. 
Now this 'given' element in life is not only 
indisputably true but is also an invaluable 

to its right and native state of relatedness to God. It does not 
thereby abrogate freedom but, on the contrary, renews it, and 
leads it not to a mere non-moral neutrality of choice but to 
its true 'law of liberty,' which says not 'I can do what I like' 
but *I love Thy law.' This idea of rational and moral, as 
opposed to a merely indifferent, freedom is seen in a man of 
long-stablished nobility of character, of whom we say he 
'could not' do some base deed, and yet not meaning that by 
his character he has forfeited moral freedom. I write this 
note to invite a deeper study of the greatest of all doctors on 
this high topic. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 109 

truth; I asserted it and built upon it in the 
previous chapter when showing the bearing of 
solidarity on the problem of the injustice of 
human suffering. But it Is not the whole truth. 
Man's life, which certainly has its roots in 
nature, has thus an inheritance, physical, men- 
tal, moral, for which he Is not responsible ; but 
when you have summed up all the elements In 
that you have not yet summed up the life of 
man. In life, as indeed in everything which is 
organic, the whole is more than the sum of the 
parts; two and two are here more than four. 
And no man can sum up his moral being by 
piecing together various given parts ; after this 
is done, he confronts the result with something 
more, which is just himself. Responsibility is 
the assertion that our moral acts are the acts 
of this self, and not simply of an addition sum 
of figures dictated by this and that In the con- 
ditions of life. It Is here, then, that my sin 
is my sin. This Is the confession of the heart 
of man before sin In all ages. The writer of 
the fifty-first Psalm did not know the doctrine 
of heredity in its modern scientific form, but he 



no THE FACTS OF LIFE 

knew the essential fact of it when he wrote: 
'Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin 
did my mother conceive me;' yet because he 
knew also, if not philosophically at least mor- 
ally and practically, a self deeper than all that, 
he said too : 'I acknowledge my transgressions : 
and my sin Is ever before me.' And so says 
the conscience of every honest man. Here we 
have, indeed, the clearest and most authentic 
facts about moral life and moral responsibility 
— that our life is something more than a sum 
of innumerable constituent conditions, and that 
in that something more, which is our self, sin 
becomes ours. No man gets past the one fact 
with permission of true philosophy, or past the 
other without violence to his conscience. 

But this hardly ends the matter. For it may 
be admitted that sin is our sin, and yet the real 
responsibility for it still lies on the Author of 
our being, who has made us what we are, and 
we are not to be blamed for following our 
nature. Here emerges to contravene this an- 
other fact of life — that sin Is not our true 
nature. It is difficult to see this in the general. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT m 

The universality of moral evil In humanity — 
One excepted — leads our minds to accept sin as 
the normal thing and the sinless One as ab- 
normal. But, on the contrary, it is ^our life' 
which is, as Byron cried, 

*a false nature — 'tis not in 
The harmony of things.'^ 

And that this is true appears, I think, when- 
ever the honest and healthy soul puts It to the 
practical test of life. Let us not look at it as 
a general and abstract proposition; there it 
sounds unreal. But take not life at large but 
some place in our own life where are opposing 
each other, on the one hand, the call of some 
evil lust and, on the other, the call of the sinless 
Christ. Where, within that area, does the 
honest and healthy soul see its truer nature? 
Not in sin. Well, if that sin is not my true life 
in that particular place, neither is it the true 
life of humanity at large. Sin is not our nature. 
Mr. Chesterton's answer to the question of 
the meaning of the Fall Is exactly correct, 'that 

^ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, iv. 126. 



112 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

whatever I am, I am not myself.'^ Sin is — 
and here is a most important point not for 
practical life only but for our whole philos- 
ophy of religion — the anti-natural. This is 
one reason why — to anticipate for a moment 
the topic of the next chapter — there is need for 
and reason in a supernatural to meet it. 

Here then are two things which emerge clear 
out of the unplumbed depth of personality, that 
our sin is our sin and that it is not our true 
nature. This does not mean that we can al- 
ways fix guilt on the individual. No one can 
look at life, no one can enter into the story of 
a sinning soul, no one can read such a play as 
Mr. Galsworthy's Silver Box and much else in 
modern literature, without feeling poignantly 
how sin is more than individual and how 
ravelled is the web of human responsibility. 
What has been said in the immediately fore- 
going paragraphs certainly does not mean that 
we are to judge one another. What it means 
is that we are not cheaply and untruly to ar- 
raign God. Such arraignment has sometimes 

^ Orthodoxy, p. 292. 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 113 

a plausibility of a superficial kind which easily 
lends Itself to a would-be bold blasphemy. A 
well-known quatrain says: — 

*Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, 
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake; 

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
Is blackened, Man's forgiveness give — and take!'^ 

I have heard this described as 'tremendous.' 
But nothing is tremendous which is not true. 

If then these be the facts emerging out of 
the abyss of personality, we may return to the 
general position that they do not drive faith 
from its hold on God despite the Insoluble 
elements In the problem of evil. Facts remain 
facts even though they are surrounded by an 
impenetrable darkness; we may therefore not 
unjustifiably maintain that the available data 
of our moral being do not deny but rather up- 
hold the divine character even in face of the 
enigma of sin In the world. I think we can 
adhere to this. But It Is Impossible to find It 
very convincing. It Is Impossible not to feel 

1 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, Ixxxl. 



114 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

how Inadequate It Is when It Is offered as all 
that can be said In God's name In face of the 
actual realities of the appalling mess (if I may 
call It so) which sin has made in the world, 
and before the degradation and disgrace and 
despair of the lives of men because of it. As 
In the case of pain, we were in the end brought 
up against the cruel concrete facts of what pain 
actually Is and does, and realised that, after all 
our philosophical comments on the subject, the 
sufferers remain, so here, when we have talked 
at large about a philosophy of evil, sinners re- 
main — souls soaked through with lusts, doing 
the deeds of Iniquity daily, living for sin and 
dying in It. I took a page from a novel to 
help us realise how cruel pain is, but no novel 
ever painted the badness of sin. Here let men 
look steadily Into their own hearts and upon 
their own lives; I do not think they will write 
down the result verbatim on the page of any 
book. This Is the real problem of sin, and it 
comes home to the conscience as really as some 
physical agony may come home to the flesh. 
To offer to a world or a soul that cries out 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 115 

'What must I do to be saved?' the thesis of 
a theodicy about a world of free and moral 
persons is no better than to prate to a man in 
agony of body or mind that all is for the best. 
Honestly, when one begins to think what sin 
really is in life — in my life and yours and 
that of the whole world — were it not better 
to have left the subject alone unless there is 
more to say than this? 

Here we are precisely at the same point as 
that to which we were led up at the close of 
the previous chapter. When we found there 
that no more was to be said by philosophy 
about the facts of pain, we turned towards a 
new thought about God as — that is, if the 
'acknowledgment of God in Christ' be true — 
Himself entering into the problem and suffer- 
ing too. It is in the same direction that we 
must turn now when our philosophy has said its 
say about sin. Is there a new thought of God 
in relation to sin to be found in Christ — espe- 
cially in the Cross of Christ — if, again, that 
'acknowledgment' be true? Certainly we 
cannot say here that God sins too. But we 



ii6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

discern here the thought of God entering into 
the situation which sin has created and saving 
us who are sinners. This is something far 
more convincing than a philosophical disquisi- 
tion about how a world of free moral persons 
might sin and did sin and yet the Creator be 
justified. What if God be not merely self- 
justification; what if God may be love? He 
is not careful, if one may so say, to prove to 
us how He is not liable for the world's sin; 
but it seems He sends His Son to seek and to 
save the lost. And this is the unanswerable 
theodicy. Whether or not a world of free 
moral persons who have sinned, or a world 
emptied of free moral persons and thus pre- 
served from sin, were the creation more worthy 
of God, certainly nothing is or can be more 
worthy of God than to redeem a world of sin- 
ners. ^Nothing,' as a father says (I think Ter- 
tuUian), *can be more worthy of God than 
man's salvation.' Than the Cross of Christ 
and the forgiveness in it, those who have seen 
God in it have never seen or imagined a divine 
which is or can be diviner. Do not let us mis- 



THE ATHEISTIC FACT 117 

take this. Here Is no explanation of the exist- 
ence of moral evil. I certainly cannot say with 
a modern writer that the Cross 'makes sense 
of sln'^ — a phrase than which It would be diffi- 
cult to invent one with less of the animus of 
the New Testament on this subject. Could 
any one imagine the Saviour saying at the Last 
Supper: 'This is my blood shed for the ra- 
tionalisation of sin?' No, redemption does not 
make 'sense of sin;' it does not and cannot 
make sin to be other than what it is. But it 
makes the character of God glorious as we 
had never seen it before. The Cross is not 
a philosophy of evil, but it is, I say again, the 
unanswerable theodicy. It is the theodicy of 
heaven as the apostolic seer depicts it breaking 
out even into exultant doxology: — 

*I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels 
round about the throne and the living creatures and 
the elders: and the number of them was ten thou- 
sand times ten thousand, and thousands of thou- 
sands ; 

'Saying with a loud voice. Worthy is the Lamb 
that was slain to receive power, and riches, and 

^Rev. William Temple in Foundation, p. 221. 



ii8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and 
blessing. 

'And every creature which is in heaven, and on 
the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in 
the sea, and all that are therein, heard I saying, 
Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto 
him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the 
Lamb for ever and ever.'^ 

Every creature which is , . . on the earth. 
Well, we are 'on the earth;' how shall we join 
in such a chorus? Is it not a rhapsody from 
some higher sphere, of which we can only say 
in Faust's words when he heard the angels' 
choir : — 

'Zu jenen Sphdren wag' ich nicht zu streben 
Woher die holde Nachricht tojit' ; 

or is it fact and reality in this world in which 
we live and where — to repeat the adaptation 
made in the first chapter of Wordsworth's line 
— Ve find our faith — or not at all'? 

Twice have we been led up to this question. 
It is time now to face it. 

1 Revelation, v. 11-13. 



IV 

THE REALITY OF CHRIST 



*A Personality which men could not have imagined, 
a Personality which must be historical and which must 
be divine.' william Robertson smith. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REALITY OF CHRIST 

The question now before us Is this : we have 
found that the discussion of two aspects of the 
facts of life which most evidently challenge 
faith — namely, suffering and sin — leads us In 
each case to the conclusion that the answer to 
the problems which they present Is in the end 
only to be found If God Himself can be thought 
of as personally loving and saving suffering 
and sinful man. Now Is such a thought based 
on reality? Has such a faith any fact to stand 
upon which can stand against the Indubitable 
realities of suffering and sin? This is our 
question. It has already been Indicated, or 
rather assumed, that the only fact upon which 
this faith can stand Is the fact of Jesus Christ; 
but perhaps this should not be at once taken 
for granted, and therefore I shall begin by 

121 



122 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

inquiring whether in nature or human nature 
there is anything which will satisfy our quest. 
I think it does not need a long argument to 
show that a gospel of a personally loving and 
saving God cannot be based on the general 
phenomena of nature. This most certainly is 
not for one moment to say that nature — all 
nature — is not of God. We are now quite 
beyond that stage of religious (or irreligious) 
thought which found God only in selected 
supernatural events. Assuredly ^Deus in Ma- 
china^ is the true God, and science which insists 
on this is witnessing truly for Him. A man 
who cannot say this is not a believer. And yet 
it is true and is, indeed, plain that the per- 
sonally loving and personally saving God and 
Father we seek must be found in something 
more personal than the phenomena of nature. 
For the relation of the Creator to us in nature 
is all on impersonal lines. There are in nature 
laws, processes, order and evolution; and it is 
true that these suggest an Author and Director. 
Yet they do not lead us to know Him as in 
any individual way cai'ing for us. They may 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 123 

lead us to acknowledge the Idea of a Power 
or Principle we call God; they cannot teach us 
to say 'Our Father.' This, surely, requires no 
argument. 

Moreover, this Is not because our knowledge 
of nature Is as yet Incomplete. It Is equally 
true even were our scientific knowledge perfect. 
Let us imagine science to have done Its perfect 
work. Let us Imagine the dream of Laplace 
realised and all the processes of the natural 
world — physical, vital, mental — reduced to a 
single common denominator. In short, let the 
molecule be found which Is the egg from which 
the whole cosmos has come. This would be 
to know the world. But would It be, In any 
religious sense, to know God? Would It bring 
man, who is spirit and capable of Intercourse 
with the Father of his spirit, and who seeks 
a divine love and a divine salvation, any 
further in the Insatiable quest of the soul: 'O 
that I might find Him' ? Would It do anything 
to answer the apostle's prayer: 'Show us the 
Father and it sufHceth us'? It would not. 
There Is nothing more utterly futile than the 



124 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

idea — cherished by some schools of science and 
feared by some schools of religion — that the 
advance of scientific knowledge of the world 
means the retrocession and, in the end, the 
supersession of religion. The place for re- 
ligion remains untouched by scientific knowl- 
edge. That place is not a few still outstanding 
phenomenal problems, such as the origin of 
life or of consciousness. It may be that such 
phenomenal problems will ever baffle the scien- 
tific synthesis; on the other hand, science is 
thoroughly entitled to say that this result is not 
what is suggested either from the past progress 
of knowledge or from the conviction of the 
unity of the world. But however this may be, 
the place and need of religion remain exactly 
what they were. For science never finds more 
than impersonal law, and religion never seeks 
less than personal love. We must not assume 
the latter search is satisfied; but we certainly 
can say it is not and it never can be satisfied 
by even a complete knowledge of the phe- 
nomena of nature. Felix qui potuit reriim 
cognoscere caiisas ; yet this is not even the be- 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 125 

ginning of his blessedness who knows the love 
and the salvation of His Father In heaven. 

But It will be said that here I am doing what 
In a former chapter I criticised Huxley for 
doing — namely, treating nature with man left 
out. Within the human soul are more than 
impersonal impressions of God. Inward in- 
tuitions are there, 

'which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day. 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.'^ 

And in these feelings — which in souls of higher 
spiritual capacity attain to be clear and com- 
manding convictions of a faith in God's per- 
sonal character and personal love, and In His 
speaking individually to His children and hear- 
ing and answering their prayers — must we not 
recognise a revelation of God intimate and 
personal, and such as our souls seek? On this 
many things may be said, but I shall here touch 
on only two points. 

One is that, as a matter of fact and experl- 

1 Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality^ ix. 



126 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

ence, inward intuitions and emotions of this 
kind do not and cannot generally maintain 
themselves as assured knowledge against the 
contradiction of outward facts in nature and 
life. There are, no doubt, minds of which this 
cannot be said — minds which, happily or other- 
wise, are so uncritically constituted that they can 
persuade themselves that what they find within 
is also fact without, and that their ideals are 
a valid standard of reality. But not many of 
us are so easily satisfied. And surely to take 
such great and definite propositions of faith as 
that God shares our sufferings and sacrifices 
Himself for our sins as securely guaranteed 
by any merely inward sentiments is to build on 
foundations palpably unable to support such a 
superstructure. The truth is that all inward 
feelings on such topics, even though we may 
feel them strongly and call them convictions, 
are so mixed up with our personal predilections 
and desires and imaginings that it is simply 
impossible to surmount the sceptical suspicions 
that they are, or at least may be, but a sub- 
jective conceiving of our own generalising 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 127 

minds. There is no guarantee other than our- 
selves that they represent more than what is 
in and of ourselves. A faith of this kind is 
(if I may here repeat a phrase I have written 
elsewhere) 'a mere edifice of conceptions in- 
securely founded on the bed-rock of fact.'^ At 
best, it will be a wistful rather than a stablished 
faith. Moreover, it is not a faith which can 
be presented by one to another from any 
ground common to both; if a man tells me he 
is sure in his experience of God's love, that 
does not help me to be sure, for he is built 
that way and I am not. A faith with this 
merely experimental basis may exist in its own 
retreat in souls of a certain type. It cannot 
face encounter with the facts of life, nor can 
it take possession, in the name of the gospel, 
of the public territory of truth. 

But a second thing is to be said about this 
appeal within to find the assurance about God 
which faith seeks. When we thus turn inward 
we discover a new need for more than nature 
without and even human nature in our own 

^ The Fact of Christ, p. 105. 



128 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

hearts can supply. We find the need of some- 
thing In addition to knowledge. We find not 
only an intellectual darkness or dimness but 
also a moral defilement. We find that anti- 
natural of which so much— by which is meant 
so little — ^was said in the previous chapter. To 
this new element and its need, nature and even 
human nature have nothing, or nothing ade- 
quate, to say. That outward nature has noth- 
ing to offer as a salving and saving message for 
a bad conscience is plain. But has even human 
nature within what really and sufficiently will 
meet this? Within the soul are, Indeed, high 
moral Ideas and ideals. But the crux of the 
whole matter Is that we have these high moral 
ideas and ideals but do not obey them. The 
word is so trite that we forget It is also true : — 

'Video meliora proboque; 
Deteriora sequor/^ 

There is here — Indisputably so — no strong sal- 
vation any more than any sure revelation. 
Much more might easily be said on these 

^ Ovid's Metam., vii. 20. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 129 

points and on others touching on this aspect 
of our subject, but perhaps enough has been 
said for our present purpose. That purpose 
Is certainly not to deny God In nature and 
human nature. But it Is to show — what in- 
deed Is Indisputable fact — that In the general 
phenomena of nature there Is not manifested 
the personal love of God, and in the Ideals of 
human nature there is not salvation. It is, 
therefore, In something more than nature and 
human nature that we must look for a basis 
for a faith In God personally loving and sav- 
ing suffering and sinful men. It is in what Is 
commonly called the 'supernatural.' One has 
scruples In using the word, not in the least 
because of any desire to evade or minimise the 
truth It Is meant to represent, but simply be- 
cause It Is so misused and misunderstood. If 
we use it, let us be clear as to what It means. 
It does not mean the sphtting of the universe 
as with a hatchet Into two sections. In one of 
which is natural law and In the other a God 
who is exlex. There Is but one universe, and 
God who is in it all is ever reason and cannot 



I30 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

deny Himself. What It means may be most 
simply stated by saying that the antithesis Is 
not between nature and miracle, or between 
law and non-law, but between the Impersonal 
and the personal action of God. In the gen- 
eral processes of nature God expresses Himself 
impersonally, just as a king does in the laws 
of his realm. But it need be no irrational 
contradiction of this that God, for adequate 
reason, should express Himself further on 
personal lines, manifesting His love to indi- 
vidual souls and saving individual lives. This 
is the only supernatural in which religion has 
interest. A mere thaumaturglcal display or a 
mere unexplained wonder is of no value for 
religion; It is the personally living and saving 
God which is the one thing of value In the 
supernatural. It is astonishing how little this 
Is perceived by even the most eminent oppo- 
nents of Christian faith on this subject. If 
ever there was an intelligent man it was Hux- 
ley; if ever there was a cultured man It was 
Matthew Arnold. Yet the test case of the 
supernatural which the former desiderated was 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 131 

a centaur trotting about, while the latter's 
example would be his pen turned into a pen- 
wiper. It is a cheap thing to speak disrespect- 
fully of distinguished men, and I hope not to 
fall into the way of doing It; but I shall take 
leave to say of these suggestions that they 
stand as a signal Illustration of how even the 
most intelligent men are capable of lapsing at 
times into unlntelligence. The Christian super- 
natural has nothing to do with silliness of this 
kind. It Is God Himself showing — as Is not 
shown on the plane of nature — that He per- 
sonally shares my life and saves me from my 
sin. The thought may be unestablished or 
untrue; but it is at least great enough not to 
be classed with the performances of a glorified 
circus or with conjuring tricks with pens. 

The question before us Is now sufficiently 
clear. It Is this, whether there Is ground for 
the faith that God, who Is the Author of all 
nature but who there manifests Himself only 
on impersonal lines, has. In a way consistent 
with His reason and worthy of Himself, also 
and further manifested Himself ^s the Father 



132 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

of souls which seek to know Him and the 
Saviour of Hves which are enslaved in sin. If 
we do not find an adequate and assured answer 
to this question in the facts of nature and 
human nature, we may now turn to test the 
reality of that answer to it which is proposed 
to us in the fact of Jesus Christ. 

In the first place, it will be well to make 
clear to our minds what kind of test of reahty 
we desiderate and should find sufficient. Well, 
real facts are of two kinds. There is such a 
thing as objective reality. The subtleties of 
philosophy can, of course, refine it away and 
show us that everything objective may be a 
deception; but, speaking practically, we all 
recognise such a thing as the reality of, say, a 
historical event. The battle of Waterloo, for 
example, really happened, and nothing can 
alter its reality as a fact. But there is another 
kind of reality, very different from the other, 
yet most essential and conclusive. This is the 
reality of experience. We do not say of love 
or happiness or hope or fear within us that 
it happens as the battle of Waterloo happened. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 133 

and yet these are real facts which we know 
and of which we are sure. These then are the 
two kinds of reality within our cognisance. 
Now neither alone is quite perfect as knowl- 
edge of reality; for objective history may be 
Inaccurately recorded for us, and subjective 
experience may be merely temperamental. But 
an exceptional degree of certainty In the test 
of reality is reached when these two — the his- 
torical or objective and the experimental or 
subjective — corroborate each other and inter- 
lock. A man who not only reads of a battle 
but has been through it, a woman who not only 
*feels happy' in her husband's love but has the 
tangible tokens of it every day in her life — 
these persons have the fullest possible cer- 
tainty of the reality of these things. Now It 
is exactly this kind of certainty which I wish 
to apply as the test of the reality of the fact 
of Jesus Christ. No less security is sufficient 
for an Issue so great as the truth of the gospel. 

First, then, let us take what I shall call the 
plain print of history. 

To many the page of history on which the 



134 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

name of Jesus Christ Is written may seem to 
be anything but plain print. Indeed, in our 
day, there are those — such as Professor Drews 
in his Die Christusmythe and Mr. J. M. 
Robertson in his Christianity and Mythology 
— who tell us it Is a blank page, for Jesus never 
existed at all. I really cannot here turn aside 
to discuss this perverse and incoherent rediictio 
ad absurdum of criticism. It must suffice to 
say, in a word, that it is more than nineteen 
centuries too late to be true. If it were true, 
the opponents of Christian faith in the first 
century, who must have known that Jesus was 
but the name of a myth, would have met the 
new religion with something far more con- 
clusive than disputing whether it was true that 
He rose or arguing that It is Inconceivable to 
think of a divine being suffering. They could 
have exploded the whole thing if Jesus never 
rose because He never died, and never died 
because He never lived, and there was no Jesus 
either to die or rise. This mythical idea Is 
really a fooling with history; and I pass from 
it by quoting the verdict of an unequalled 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 135 

authority on the subject of religious mythology, 
Dr. J. G. Frazer, that It would be just as 
reasonable to question the historic existence of 
Alexander the Great or Charlemagne/ Still, 
this extravagance apart, that there Is to-day a 
real and pressing problem with regard to the 
page of print with which we are dealing Is in- 
disputable. Criticism is continually deciphering 
it, and seems to find the text often corrupt and 
almost illegible. A celebrated scholar — Dr. 
Schmiedel — leaves us with some ten lines^ upon 
which to build a life of Jesus. It Is this critical 
uncertainty which invites so many persons to- 
day to find a Christianity Independent of the 
historical Jesus. It befogs and bewilders many 
a mind to-day that used to read securely about 
Christ in the gospels, and causes It to say: 
'They have taken away my Lord, and I know 
not where they have laid Him.' I have known 
persons who read the gospels through, as it 
were for the last time, feeling that henceforth 
they could never be sure that the Jesus therein 

1 Attis, Adonis, Osiris ( The Golden Bough, pt. iv.) > P- 202, n. 
^Encyclopedia Biblica, art. 'Gospels,' § 139. 

10 



136 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

described is really true. This difficulty and 
danger are far too real to be evaded, in the 
pulpit or anywhere else. There is no use pre- 
tending that criticism has not profoundly al- 
tered our attitude to the evangelical narrative 
(as to the Bible generally), and it is not pos- 
sible for the educated modern reader, at all 
conversant with critical methods and results, 
to take it as the uncritical believing mind used 
to do. And it is affectation and worse to deny 
that many perturbing questions thus are forced 
upon the honest mind. But it is an entire mis- 
take to conclude that, because of all this, what 
it is essential for us to know about the Jesus 
of history in order to read the gospel in Him 
is therefore lost in haze. Jesus Himself is 
that gospel. The essential thing is that we 
have sure knowledge of Him. It is not essen- 
tial — essential, I mean, for the assurance that 
here is God's word of personal love and sal- 
vation for men — that we must have sure and 
indisputable knowledge of everything about 
Him. I repeat it: Jesus Himself as reality is 
what we need to know. And it is this which 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 137 

in the gospels has an even historical reality 
which is indisputable and indestructible. But 
this must be said more distinctly and justified. 
What, then, more distinctly is meant by 
speaking of Jesus 'Himself as essential, and 
distinguishing from this 'everything about 
Him' ? I think we can answer if we look at 
our own selves. What is my self, as distin- 
quishable from the special incidents of my life? 
We do not seek here, in reply to this question, 
any philosophical definition; we wish to know 
where this self is to be found. Well, a man's 
self is found in his relations to things, and 
more specifically in these three vital relation- 
ships; to God, to his own consciousness, and 
to others and the world. The incidents of his 
life express the man's self in these three rela- 
tions, which are the lines along which his self 
comes into actual being. To know Jesus 
'Himself,' therefore, is not to construct Christo- 
loglcal formulas about His Person; it is to in- 
quire what, as a matter of historical fact, was 
His relation to God, what His self-conscious- 
ness, and what His attitude towards man. 



138 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Now it is Jesus in these vital relations of life 
who is indisputable and indestructible. 

I surely do not need to attempt once more 
to do what has been done in innumerable ways 
by students of the Person of Jesus Christ — 
namely, set forth what the Figure in the gospels 
is in these respects. The fewest possible words 
must suffice here. First, then, as regards His 
relation to God, we find one whose filial con- 
sciousness towards Him was absolutely un- 
broken and perfect, who never needed even 
once, as the saintliest among us need continu- 
ally, to return to the Father by the road of 
repentance and reformation, and who, further, 
knew the things of God, not spelling them out 
from below in much dimness and doubt, and 
making many mistakes, as the wisest of us do, 
but as one speaking from the region where 
these are seen and sure, and announcing them 
with an authority which is final as the law of 
God itself. Then, as regards what we call the 
self-consciousness of Jesus, we find one who 
had nothing of that dualism between the ideal 
and the actual — Hes deux hommes en moi' — 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 139 

which Is the very first datum within our moral 
consciousness (and, according to the experience 
of all the saints, It Is those who live nearest 
God who feel this dualism most and confess 
their failure and sin because of it) ; and one, 
moreover, who, without any sense either of 
presumption or incongruity, regarded Himself 
and offered Himself as one in whom all hu- 
manity's spiritual needs could be met. Lastly, 
as regards Jesus' relation to others, we find 
one who took up an attitude which no one of 
us has the right to take up towards any fellow- 
man — calling for a surrender of the very self 
to Him, claiming to be the final judge of their 
lives as of their destinies, and, above all, not 
merely preaching to them about the forgive- 
ness of God, but Himself, most personally, 
forgiving their sins, so that, most naturally, 
the onlookers called it blasphemy. This — 
stated in the baldest possible terms — Is what 
the Jesus of the gospels was In His relation 
to God, In His own self-consciousness, in His 
attitude to men. It is not single incidents or 
sayings which exhibit this; It Is the whole 
picture. 



I40 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

But, it is asked, is the picture authentic? 
I desire to answer this question distinctly and 
unevasively. Upon the mare magnum of the 
purely critical discussion of the New Testament 
documents I cannot be expected here to em- 
bark; but the general argument I shall adduce 
is sufficient, if it be valid, to meet the crux of 
the question. 

The answer of negative criticism to what 
has just been said about Jesus is that all this 
is to be accounted for as a later development 
of the thought of the Christian community, 
which, persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah 
and anxious to promote that conviction, more 
and more exaggerated the accounts of His life 
and personality to suit the case, and so, as a 
noteworthy English writer puts it, *the testi- 
mony even of eye-witnesses rose unconsciously 
to meet the high demand for a fit account of 
the Messiah's work.' ^ Now a good deal might 
be fairly said upon this on strictly critical 
grounds — that, for example, it takes time and 
could hardly be done with success immediately 

^ J. Estlin Carpenter's First Three Gospels, p. 83. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 141 

upon Christ's death and In face of those who 
knew Him In life, and yet that this picture Is 
not a portrait of later as distinguished from 
the earlier and primitive tradition.^ But, not 
to enter upon any discussion as to this (which 
would necessarily be a detailed discussion), 
I shall rather submit the Impossibility Involved 
in such a theory as that just indicated — an im- 
possibility which is at once more intelligible 
and more final than any merely critical ob- 
jection. 

In the first place, let it be admitted that this 
kind of thing — this exaggeration of the por- 
trait under the stimulus of a desire to prove 
Jesus to have been the Messiah — could be done 
in the reporting of various details of His life. 
It is clearly possible, In some such personal or 
doctrinal party-interest, to work up an Incident 
into a miracle and to make a story fit nicely 

1 Dr. Denney's Jesus and the Gospel is an exhaustive and 
really conclusive argument for the last statement. What is 
said of Jesus in the text above is practically all contained 
within Professor Flinders Petrie's 'Nucleus' of the primitive 
record, and the essentials of it are in the early speeches in 
the Book of Acts, which even Dr. Schmiedel says give a pic- 
ture that 'must have come from a primitive source.' 



142 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

into a prophecy. But, as has already been 
indicated, the challenging thing about Jesus 
Christ is not this or that detail in the gospels, 
but is the whole personality in and behind all 
incidents aand stories. It is a personality — a 
character, a consciousness — than which I ven- 
ture to say there is nothing in the whole range 
of literature less like the invention of men. 
After all, we know pretty well by this time 
what the human mind, even in men of great 
genius, can create in literature; and when we 
compare these figures with the Figure in the 
gospel, the mot juste is Rousseau's — Ce n'est 
pas ainsi qu^on invent e. When critics in this 
enlightened and educated and cultured twen- 
tieth-century England tell us this incomparable 
character and consciousness — the 'divinity' of 
which, not in the dogmatic or ecclesiastical 
sense but in the moral and spiritual sense, has 
impressed itself on the noblest thought of the 
world for two thousand years and is undimmed 
to-day — were originally created and then con- 
sistently carried through by some obscure 
Jewish pamphleteers of the second century in 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 143 

the party-Interest of an ecclesiastical propa- 
ganda, I am Inclined to make reply thus : 'And 
shall we — we "who speak the tongue that 
Shakespere spoke" [here I should certainly 
work In Shakespere for all he is worth] — shall 
we be put to shame by Jewish second-century 
pamphleteers? Let us do It. You, then, do 
it, or something like It. Create — and, at some 
length, fill In — the portrait of a man who lives 
in perfect unison with God, who often talks 
to others about their bad self but is never 
conscious of his own, and who, with no sense 
of impropriety, claims absolute dominion over 
men's life, judges their souls, and takes it on 
Him to forgive their sins. You do it, I say — 
as these second-century Jewish fellows did — 
and get the world to call it divine; thus will 
you at once glorify our literature, immortalise 
your names, and prove the case.' This is said 
in the form of a jest, and perhaps one should 
apologise for assuming, even momentarily, a 
jesting tone on such a question. But it is said 
seriously too. The truth is that, far from being 
able to produce such a personality as Jesus 



144 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Christ in the original, the finest minds feel how 
unable they are ever to reproduce Him. Why 
will an adequate life of Jesus never be written? 
Why, if not because, as Matthew Arnold said, 
'we cannot explain Him, cannot get behind 
Him and above Him, cannot command Him'?^ 
We do not speak thus even of Shakespere's 
characters; and assuredly the last man to speak 
thus of the literary creation of second-century 
Jews was Matthew Arnold. No, verily — and 
to sum it all up — various are the relationships 
men may hold towards Jesus Christ, but one 
they cannot hold. They may be His oppo- 
nents or His disciples; they may be critics or 
worshippers ; they may be doubters or believers. 
But they cannot — never could and never can — 
be His creators. 

It is impossible, without unduly extending 
this chapter, to develop this argument further, 
here. It is not, let me say, the argument of 
orthodoxy; no one has stated it more explicitly 
than John Stuart Mill, who declares *it is no 
use to say that Christ as exhibited in the gospels 

^Literature and Dogma (Preface to Popular Edition). 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 145 

Is not historical/ for, while 'the tradition of 
His followers suffices to insert any number of 
marvels' and suchlike, who, either of His dis- 
ciples or of the early Christian writers, 'was 
capable of Inventing the sayings ascribed to 
Jesus or of Imagining the life and character 
revealed In the gospels'?^ It Is the argument 
neither of orthodoxy nor of heterodoxy; it is 
the argument of plain critical reason. Let the 
reader, who would pursue and test it further, 
take the gospels In his hand and read them 
with the mind and conscience which are ready 
to recognise and receive spiritual life and truth. 
He will find many Incidents which, frankly, he 
hardly knows what to do with. But he will 
find also, as Dr. Denney has put It, 'there Is 
a person before his eyes In the gospels whose 
spiritual reality (to express It thus) Is so In- 
disputable that It carries his historical reality 
along with It.'^ He may say that the evangel- 
ists may have made this or that story about 

1 Three Essays on Religion: Theism, v. The whole passage 
should be read. 

^ Jesus and '^^ Gospel, p. 167. 



146 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Jesus; he will not say they made Jesus Himself, 
whom it Is as far beyond the most enthusiastic 
belief to have created as it is beyond the most 
critical unbelief to destroy. 

Here we have already touched our second 
line of witness to the reality of Christ — that 
of experience — and to this I now pass. 

There is more need to be critical about the 
script of experience than even the print of 
history. It is so easy here to talk largely and 
loosely, to be unscientific and inaccurate, to 
make experience say more than, as a matter of 
fact. It can say. We must criticise our experi- 
ence if it is to teach us safely. This is the 
case with even human emotions; the best and 
most Interpretative love-poetry, for example, 
Is not that of mere youthful sentimentalists, 
but Is given us by those who — not coldly, in- 
deed, but truly — read what their passion means. 
And certainly it is the case with religious ex- 
perience. If then we are going to call in this 
witness to corroborate the testimony to the 
reality of Christ, let us not give the rein to 
vague emotions and impressions, but keep 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 147 

strictly to what, in a real and sure sense, are 
facts of moral and spiritual experience. 

It is obvious, to begin with, that experience 
cannot be asked to corroborate the mere ex- 
ternal incidents of the life of Christ; but we 
have seen that the essential thing for us Is 
not this or that incident but is Jesus Himself. 
Even as regards Jesus Himself, however, it is 
obvious that our experience cannot witness to 
everything; we cannot, for example, reproduce 
within our consciousness that unique self-con- 
sciousness which is depicted, with such con- 
vincing historic reality, in the gospels. The 
crucial aspect of the personality of Jesus which 
may be tested In our experience is His relation 
to man. What, then, we must ask, is Jesus — 
this historical Jesus of the gospels — to us in 
the experience of mind and heart and con- 
science and life? To this question I believe 
and submit that experience gives an answer 
which is clear and indisputable. 

When our minds and hearts and consciences 
and lives directly and honestly face Jesus Christ 
— the historical Jesus Christ, I say again, of 



148 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

the gospels — what we are met with may, I 
think, be characterised thus : it is a call, leading 
when obeyed into a companionship, and this, 
in turn, the source of a new life. Other words 
may, of course, be used to describe this, but 
that these are real elements in the experience 
of a man really turned towards Christ and 
faithfully trying to be true to Him can hardly, 
I think, be questioned. Now, what is it which 
is the crucial characteristic of the experience 
of this call, companionship, and life? In order 
to answer this we need not make claim to be 
profoundly experienced Christians. The thing 
I am going to name will be recognised as true 
even by those of us whose obedience to the 
call, faithfulness to the fellowship, and realisa- 
tion of the life lived with Christ are of the 
poorest. But the one thing we do know about 
this relationship to Him, if we know anything 
about it at all, is this, that this call of, com- 
panionship with, and power from Christ are 
simply identical with the call, companionship, 
and power of God Himself. This is really the 
most clear and indisputable thing in any Chris- 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 149 

tian man's relationship with Christ. He makes 
and can make no kind of distinction within his 
experience between 'knowing God' and 'know- 
ing Him whom He hath sent' — that is, Jesus 
Christ. Indeed, as Dr. Harnack puts it, 'every 
relationship to God' — that is, of course, in the 
things of the gospel — 'is at the same time a 
relationship to Jesus Christ.'^ In all this I 
do not mean anything dogmatic — any doctrine 
of God and Christ. I am speaking solely of 
what is found fact in experience; and nothing 
in Christian experience is so clearly or really 
fact as this, that to hear Christ's call is to 
hear God, to know Christ's companionship is 
to have fellowship with God, to live life under 
the influence of Christ is to live it with God. 
If Christianity means anything at all in the 
soul, it means this. As this is the most surely 
attested, so Is it also the most widely attested 
fact In what we call Christian experience. The 
Christian beginner at least recognises that his 
response to Christ has been just his response 
to God; while the most experienced saint never 

^ Dogmengeschichte, iii. 69. 



I50 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

finds that he gets past this relationship to 
Christ to another and deeper relationship with 
God beyond. Here, then, is a fact of life about 
Jesus Christ which we can take as solid and 
can verify as sure. 

Let us now place together the central and 
indestructible thing in the history and this 
crucial and indisputable thing in our experience. 

Do they not indeed interlock? There, in 
history, is One whose personality is assuredly 
not that merely of one man of the world's 
population — One, in particular, whose relation- 
ship to man was that which no man can take to 
another, but is indeed the relationship which 
only God can assume to any of us. And here, 
in our moral and spiritual experience — no 
vague emotion in it but its surest fact — is the 
same person meaning for us not simply one 
more of the world's population or even a great 
teacher of long ago, but what only God Him- 
self can mean and be. Let us, for the present, 
disregard any kind of theological synthesis of 
all this. Let us look solely and simply at the 
facts — the two facts which come to be one fact, 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 151 

for each is the complement and corroboration 
of the other. Do they not, I ask again, Inter- 
lock? If so, the fact of Christ has surely the 
highest possible kind of reality, and the search 
of our faith for a sure word which should mean 
God personally speaking to us, caring for us, 
saving us has been not in vain. 

At the risk of reiteration, let me still further 
emphasise this combination of both these ele- 
ments as that which makes faith fast. We are 
constantly being told that history Is unnecessary 
and irrelevant here, and also that the two to- 
gether — the historical and the experiential — 
are Incongruous and incompatible. I shall say 
a word on each of these contentions. The 
former takes high philosophical ground. 'Ac- 
cidental truths of history,' it declares in oft- 
quoted words of Lessing, 'can never be proof 
of necessary truths of reason.' My answer Is 
very simple. I am not seeking any necessary 
truth of reason. I want to know this — whether 
or not God personally speaks to me lovingly 
and savingly. It is quite consistent with eternal 
reason that He does not. But If He does — 
11 



152 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

let this be clear — It will be shown, not in some 
category of Divine Immanence, for immanence 
conceals rather than reveals character, but by 
individual deeds done in life even as a man's 
character is thus revealed. It is not in a phi- 
losophy of ideas necessarily true in reason, but 
by seeing what God has done for us in Jesus 
Christ, who lived In the theatre of this world, 
that we shall ever find the data for the gospel 
of God's personal love which we seek. The 
other contention — that the historical and the 
experiential in faith are Incongruous and in- 
compatible — raises a question of simple fact. 
The antithesis between these is statable on 
paper; but It simply is not a fact in the Chris- 
tian life. On the contrary, it is just as we deal 
in mind and conscience with the historic person 
of the evangelical records that our religious 
experience of the knowledge of God and com- 
munion with Him grows rich and strong and 
meaningful and sure; and, correspondingly, 
these experiences are delivered from that fatal 
subjectivity of which I have already spoken in 
an earlier page of this chapter, only when 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 153 

they are experiences which Christ creates and 
countenances. To put this in theological ter- 
minology, Jesus Christ (the historical) gives 
to us His Spirit (the experiential) ; and, on the 
other hand, the Spirit speaks not of Himself, 
but takes of the things of Christ and shows 
them to us. The alleged incompatibility is 
simply not a fact, and any merely logical state- 
ment of It solvitur ambulando. Further, when 
It Is maintained that these two elements — the 
historical and the spiritual — are of different 
worlds and move In different orbits, I reply 
that Jesus Christ, who Is the gospel, Is of both 
these worlds and in both these orbits. He Is a 
fact of history as fully as Julius Cassar Is. He 
is a spiritual fact as really as human love Is. 
The Christian gospel, then, is neither a mere 
history, for that would make it a tradition, and 
tradition cannot save, nor a mere experience, 
for that would make it subjective, and what is 
subjective is never secure; It is both. The 
two, I repeat, interlock. They countersign 
each other's witness. And this Is the unique 
test of the reality of the faith of the gospel. 



154 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

'That which God hath joined together, let no 
man put asunder.'^ 

This chapter must not be much longer ex- 
tended, but, having said so much as has been 
said as to the reality of this fact of Christ as 
a fact more than anything In nature or human 
nature, we must, at least briefly, recognise what 
is involved in this both intellectually and re- 
ligiously. 

That the Intellectual consequences of such a 
faith are deep and far-reaching is evident. A 
Christ who thus transcends nature and human 
nature means not less than that the boundaries 

^ I may add In a note that here is an illustration of two 
things which have often struck my mind about many ques- 
tions. One is the danger of false antithesis in reasoning, 
where we are told to accept one or other of two categories 
when truth is found by holding on to both. False antithesis 
and loose terminology are the two greatest pitfalls of the 
mind. The other thing rises out of this, and is that in a 
number of questions the truth lies in a balance of apparent 
contraries. To use a mathematical figure. It Is an ellipse with 
two foci, rather than a circle with one centre. In many sub- 
jects I feel with Joubert when he said he 'liked to see two 
truths at once.' This applies to conduct also, where it is not 
enough to have a principle and run amok with it, but where 
(as Principal Rainy once phrased it) 'you must let one prin- 
ciple play upon another.' A dissertation might be written on 
'The Equipoise of Truth,' but this Is not the place to attempt it. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 155 

of cognisable reality in the world and in history 
are enlarged; and this means a revised estimate 
both of nature and history. Now here I simply 
decline to get into a discussion of the possibility 
of 'miracle.' Really, I do not know exactly 
what a miracle is, and have never read a defi- 
nition which was much better than a begging of 
the question from one side or the other. But 
I think I know what a fact is. And if anything 
is a fact — indelible in history and indisputable 
in life — It is that in Jesus Christ is that which 
Is not either in nature or human nature. In- 
stead of discussing the supernatural a priori, 
what we have to do is to make room in our 
mind for that fact. On this I wish to make 
two remarks. On the one hand, it is not to 
be misstated; on the other, it Is not to be 
minimised or evaded. It is misstated when It 
Is represented as meaning the destruction of 
the Idea of the unity of the order of the world. 
The unity of the order of the world was a 
Christian thought long before it was articulated 
by science. Never did it find more explicit 
assertion than in these words : 'All things were 



156 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

made by Him; and apart from Him not a 
thing was made that has been made.'^ What 
this fact of Christ, as more than nature, does 
mean is that the category of unity is not what 
we call 'natural law,' but is that living and 
loving God who is in Him. But it is even 
more incumbent to say this fact of Christ must 
not be minimised or evaded, and on this I wish 
to speak more particularly. 

If you say you accept the reality of this 
Christ, then you must take the intellectual 
consequences of saying so unevasively. It is 
neither fair nor frank to say it in one sense 
and unsay it in another. Yet there is nothing 
commoner in a great deal of modern literature 
on Jesus Christ than this very speaking with 
two voices. As an example of this I take an 
eminent name, and one of a man we all regard 
with admiration and indebtedness. On this 
question Dr. Harnack distinguishes in a most 
curious way between what may be accepted as 
a fact in history and what must be received as 
a fact in religion. 'The historian,' he says, 

1 St. John i. 6. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 157 

'cannot regard the supernatural as a sure his- 
torical event;' for, the writer continues, 'by 
doing so he Is destroying the very method of 
Interpreting things upon which all historical 
investigation depends.' This seems quite clear 
and final; 'but' — and it Is a most notable aher — 
Dr. Harnack Immediately goes on, if this same 
historian be convinced that Jesus did what is 
'in the strict sense miraculous,' he 'Infers' from 
this 'a supernatural person,' which inference, 
however, 'belongs to the province of religious 
faith.' ^ Now I pass over comment on this 
reference to historical 'method' with the single 
observation that the 'only method' upon which 
any historical investigation has any right to 
depend is to be open to recognise whatever can 
establish a case to be recognised as a fact; and 
surely I am speaking within reason and with 
studied moderation when I say that Jesus 
Christ as a fact not to be accounted for in 
terms of nature has, after twenty centuries of 
scrutiny, a case not to be peremptorily non- 

'^ Dogmengeschichte, ii. 50 n. (E. T., History of Dogma, i. 
65 n.). 



158 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

suited at the bar of history by any 'method.' 
But, passing from that, I wish to ask if this 
separation between what a man qua historian 
must deny and qua believer may infer is tenable. 
Man is not an intellectual amphibian. He has 
only one mind, and he lives in one world of 
truth ; it is not possible to split either the mind 
or the world into two parts, each with its own 
allegiance. I venture to put this, with entire 
respect, more personally. Dr. Harnack, a 
prominent and influential teacher, is asked 
whether the supernatural personality of Jesus 
Christ is a credible fact. He answers — I do 
not think this is unfair or caricature — that first 
he must know whether he is to reply in the 
capacity of historian or that of a man of re- 
ligious faith. Surely we may retort that we 
desire Dr. Adolf Harnack to reply, and we 
were not aware there is more than one Dr. 
Harnack. Some men have greater minds than 
the rest of us, but they have not more minds. 
And thus, I conclude, if we are going to accept 
at all the reality of this Christ of whom we 
have been speaking, we must do it with our 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 159 

one mind and with the whole of it, whatever 
be the intellectual consequences. 

But it is with the consequences of Jesus 
Christ for religion that here we are more con- 
cerned. It means such a faith as that which 
we found such problems as suffering and sin 
forced us to seek — a faith in God as personally 
loving and saving us and indeed our God and 
our Father. 'He that hath seen me,' said Jesus, 
'hath seen the Father; how sayest thou then. 
Show us the Father?' Is this then the answer 
to that profound cry of the human soul that 
stretches past the impersonal laws and processes 
of nature for the living God and cries : 'O that 
I might find Him^l There are many minds 
which so unquestioningly accept Christian faith 
that they have never doubted this answer is 
entirely true; there are others which are so 
confirmedly agnostic that they have never given 
it even a moment's credence. There is a cer- 
tain want of realisation of the issue at stake 
in both of these attitudes of mind. I think it 
is when a man realises what it means not to 
believe thus about God that he is driven again 






i6o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to Christ with the words ; Xord, I believe, help 
Thou mine unbelief;' and, on the other hand, 
it is when he in some degree realises what a 
stupendous thing it is to think of God as thus 
loving and saving him that it seems really im- 
possible to be true, and he is thrown back again 
into doubt. I do not understand either a satis- 
fied unbelief or a facile faith. 

Let us, then as a poet who knew both un- 
belief and faith ^ bids us, 'consider it again.' 
Is it surely true — this gospel, familiarity with 
the sound of which has dulled our minds to the 
magnitude of its amazingness? We know, of 
course, that many noble teachers have preached 
to men the love of God. In particular, Jesus 
did so. But if these were just human opinions, 
and if even Jesus was no more than a pure- 
minded and guileless Galilean peasant who has 
been dead now these many hundred years — 
such a 'faithful, tormented, questioning, bat- 
tling man' who 'died with broken hopes,' as 
that of Gustav Frenssen's popular story^ — 

lA. H. Clough. 

2 The Story of Jesus: Retold by a Modern Disciple. Trans- 
lated from the German of G. Frenssen by Dr. Archibald DuflF. 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST i6i 

why shall I build my faith on their ideas when 
there is nothing to show of fact which may be 
guarantee that what they say corresponds with 
reality? Speaking is easy work — even speak- 
ing about the love of God. It is data that the 
gospel needs. If then there be no such basis 
of fact for this gospel, let us not talk as if 
there were. To ask me to believe it from 
these lofty teachers, without any data^ is futile; 
the facts against it are too strong. We need 
not become aggressive unbelievers, but let us 
be quiet at least. We must probably give up 
many fine thoughts and fond hopes — not, cer- 
tainly, all fine thoughts about life or fond 
hopes, but the deepest of them and the dearest 
— and we may as well give up, except in the 
sense of soliloquy, our prayers. The world be- 
comes chillier, darker, emptier. But we must 
just live a little in it and love a little In it and 
work a little in it and then die out of it as 
every one else has to do. So do we, at times, 
tell ourselves that, if there be no assured gospel 
of a Father's love. It does not matter so much, 
and we can get on well enough with an agnostic 



1 62 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

mind and a stoic heart. But this mood is a 
mask which may at any moment fall off. 'Just 
when we 're safest' (as Browning says in lines 
too familiar for quotation) something wakens, 
now a hope and now a fear, which makes us 
feel that it matters even infinitely whether there 
be not more to be said of the great mysteries 
of God and the soul, of sin and salvation, of 
life and death, than the stars and the hills and 
the seas can ever say or even than we can say 
to ourselves in our dim-lit minds and defiled 
hearts. We stretch once more the hand and 
strain the ear. It is in vain: — 

'T>extrae jungere dextram 
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces/ ^ 

Why, then, may not Christ, offered as 'the 
Word of God,' be accepted as the word we 
seek and need? Because, it is replied, what 
is supernatural is inadmissible. Well, as a 
theorem, as an abstract idea in a conception of 
the world, the supernatural may well seem in- 

1 Virgil's Mneid, i. 408. ('To clasp hand with hand is not 
given, nor to hear or utter reliable speech.') 



THE REALITY OF CHRIST 163 

admissible. But this gospel comes to us here 
not as a bare abstract theorem; It comes in a 
person. Look, then, straight into the eyes of 
Jesus Christ. Examine Him, with an earnest 
and a fair mind, In history; face Him, with an 
awakened and frank conscience. In moral and 
spiritual life. What the result may be for any 
other is not for me to say, but I will say what 
for me is the result. It — a theorem about a 
divine, supernatural word — is Incredible; it Is 
too remote from reality to be convincing or 
even Interesting, and Is far too unlikely to be 
true. But He Is Indisputable; He Is too real 
to be denied and far 'too good' not 'to be true.' 
I ended the last chapter with an angels' 
chorus. We may be very unfit to join In that. 
But we may — Indeed, must we not?- — join In 
the confession of those first disciples, men on 
earth like ourselves, who said to Jesus : 'Lord, 
to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life. And we believe and are sure 
that Thou art that Christ, the Son of the living 
God.' 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 



'There are two happinesses, that of nature and that 
of conquest — two equilibria, that of Greece and that of 
Nazareth — two kingdoms, that of the natural nnian and 
that of the regenerate man.' 

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 



CHAPTER V 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 

The topic discussed in the last chapter is the 
crucial question about Jesus Christ, and yet it 
does not end the challenge which life presents 
to faith. We must now go on to consider the 
facts of life, or some typical aspects of them, 
with a further question in our minds — the 
question, namely, of whether the view of things 
expressed in what we associate with Jesus 
Christ is sufficient and adequate for life, or 
whether other points of view are not larger 
and richer. I shall, in this chapter, consider 
this in the light of what may be called the 
positive of human life — the claim of humanism 
to be the real and rich way of living; in the 
chapter following we must consider the nega- 
tive side. 

What Is meant by the former of these Issues 
may be stated thus. Let it be admitted that 
much of what has been said about Christ is or 
n 16'/ 



1 68 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

may be true. Let it be admitted that He is, 
in a very real sense, a supreme and even super- 
natural Figure, and also that He is truly the 
source of an immediate knowledge of and 
communion with God. Still — here is the ques- 
tion now before us — is not this, after all, but 
one element in life? Is not human experience 
in this great and interesting world a far 
broader and more manifold thing than is cov- 
ered by this internal colloquy between Jesus 
Christ and the soul about repentance and for- 
giveness and the like? Can you then put life 
under the single domination of even this 
Master and under the one law even of His 
authority? In short — and even where it is 
admitted that Jesus Christ is, in a real sense, 
true for religion — is He and is His gospel 
adequate for all that this wonderful life of 
ours contains, and especially for its great 
human aspects which give to it so much of its 
interest and richness and sweetness and, despite 
all its sorrows, joy? 

These questions of to-day are not in them- 
selves new, but they are finding new and very 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 169 

distinct expressions in our age. The modern 
mind has not only a larger conception of the 
physical universe than was known in the times 
when the gospel was first preached, but also 
a larger sense of human life than at least the 
Jews of those days knew. And its motto cer- 
tainly Is im Ganzen — whether or not always 
im Gilt en or im Schonen — resolut zu lehen. 
It is ready and waiting to say *Yes' to life. 
Now it is easy to perceive how impatient a 
mood like this becomes to anything which is 
of the nature of a cordon round any part of 
life, or seems to lay any limiting law upon 
ideas and aims in life which it is formulating 
for itself. And it is just this which much in 
the mind of to-day finds In religion and not 
least in Christianity. Thus arises a new chal- 
lenge to the standards and sanctions of an older 
view of life. No one has appreciated this 
phase of modern feeling better than Dr. 
Eucken, and I shall quote one of his many 
statements of it: — 

*In its rich unfolding of life, the modern world 
has brought an untold wealth of things new and 



I70 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

great whose influence no one can escape and whose 
fruits we all enjoy. But with this incontestable 
gain there is closely interwoven a characteristic 
tendency which is deeply involved in doubt and 
conflict. Since the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, the modern world has wrought out a new 
type of life, which departs widely from the Chris- 
tian. ... The greater the strength and self-con- 
sciousness which this new type acquires, the more 
evident it becomes that it is incompatible with 
Christianity; in fact, the fundamental tendencies 
of the two run directly counter to each other. 
Their peaceable and friendly co-operation, such as 
existed in earlier times, becomes impossible; a clear 
understanding is increasingly necessary ; continually 
harsher is the rejection of Christianity by those \vho 
follow the specifically modern tendency.'^ 

Thus is it that we have in the present day 
non-Christian ideals of life held up to us which 
not only do not accept the Christian ideal but 
vigorously oppose it as — to use a phrase of 
Eucken's in some other place — 'the enemy of 
the energy and truth of life.' These last words 
express a feeling towards the law and gospel 
of Christ which to-day finds many forms of 
expression and which demands examination. 
1 The Problem of Human Life, p. 297. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 171 

Probably the two most notable exponents of 
this are Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. 
The former has rightly seen that the only way 
finally to 'smash' Christianity is to dethrone its 
ethical ideal. 'So long as men go on admiring 
Jesus and making Him their ideal, no good will 
come from disproving the gospel history.'^ So 
Nietzsche preaches a 'noble morality' which 
exults in a spirit the reverse of that of Christ, 
and declares humility and sacrifice to be the 
principles only of the weaklings of humanity.^ 
Nearer home, Mr. Shaw holds forth a gospel 
of freedom through the rejection of all kinds of 
moral sanctions or restraints, whether they be 
Christian or any other, and the refusal to allow 
any consideration of ethical differentiation to 
stand in the way of whatever impulse is able to 
command. From this freedom many people 
would turn back when they see how it works out 
In life; but not so Mr. Shaw, who writes: — 

'If a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction 
against the preaching of duty or self-sacrifice and 

^ Figgis's Cimlisation at the Cross-Roads, p. 59. 
2 I shall refer to Nietzsche's 'noble morality' in the closing 
chapter. 



172 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

the rest of it, were to tell me that she was deter- 
mined not to murder her own instincts and throw 
away her life in obedience to a mouthful of empty 
phrases, I should say to her: "By all means, do 
as you propose. Try how wicked you can be. It 
is precisely the same experiment as trying how 
good you can be." ' ^ 

These Instances (on the latter of which I shall 
say a few words later in this chapter) may be 
extreme. But their point of view Is deep In 
the mind of the modern man, and I am Inclined 
to think even deeper In the mind of the modern 
woman — the view, namely, that there are re- 
gions In life which are a law to themselves, and 
In which any other authority, even In the name 
of religion or of Christ Himself, Is (to use 
again Eucken's phrase) *an enemy to the energy 
and truth of life.' Do not many persons — 
neither Nietzscheans nor Shavians, but morally 
clothed and rationally In their right mind — feel 
something of this In relation, for example, to 
art or to science? These are realms where the 
whole Interest of the gospel seems not so much 

1 The Sanity of Art, p. 44. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 173 

untrue as irrelevant. If a man will put this 
to the test he may be surprised to find how far 
it will lead him. Let him, to name one case, 
really steep his soul in the beauty and the pas- 
sion that are in Greek literature — and if we 
are going to claim an autonomy from even 
Christian authority for certain spheres of life, 
let It be done for the sake of the balanced and 
serene spirit that breathes and burns in Sopho- 
cles or Sappho rather than at the instance of 
any neurotic and noisy moderns — and he will 
find himself in a world where the questions and 
calls of the gospel simply lose interest and 
almost meaning. Nor is It only In connection 
with such matters of the higher Intellectual life, 
as art or science, that this autonomy asserts 
itself. It Is not less strong in the emotional 
life. Thus do not many persons — though they 
may defend their minds from formulating it — 
feel in the same way about human love, which 
comes, when it does come, as an absolute which 
is its own lord? It Is not always easy to recon- 
cile with thoughts such as these the supremacy 
and sufficiency of the gospel which would crown 



174 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Christ as the law of life and 'Lord of all.' The 
result of this, even when it does not go the 
length of positively anti-Christian assertions 
of moral independence of the principles of the 
gospel, is, as I have already indicated, a feeling 
that there Is a larger life to be lived than the 
Christian, and that the wise man will be (to use 
Mr. Edmund Gosse's phrase about Walter 
Pater) 'not all for Apollo nor all for Christ.'^ 
Here is a far more insidious question for faith 
than anything said by a blatant materialism. 
The suggestion finds perfect expression in a 
sentence or two from the pen of one of the 
most refinedly sceptical minds in contemporary 
European literature. In one of M. Anatole 
France's books a convert to the Christian life 
says of her spiritual instructor that she be- 
lieves him 'car il possede la verite! To which 
Nicias, the typical cultured second-century 
Greek, smilingly replies: 'Et moi, je possede 
les verites, II vl en a qu!une; je les ai toutes. 
Je suis plus riche que luiJ^ This Is a thought 

1 Critical Kitcats, by E. Gosse, p. 270. 

2 Thais, 5t«8. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 175 

of life which Insinuates Itself deep Into the 
mind of to-day — the thought of life as some- 
thing larger, richer, more manifold than the 
Christian view of it. Here is something we 
must adjust to the claim of Him we call Mas- 
ter and 'Lord of all.' 

It Is obvious that the ascetic solution, which 
Is the official answer of a large section of 
Christendom, does not meet the case. Apart 
altogether from Its being really not true to the 
spirit of Jesus Christ, who came eating and 
drinking, or to the practice of the apostles who, 
amid the splendid sacrifices they made for the 
gospel, did not proscribe or renounce the world 
of human life. It Is plain that If the ascetic 
principle were completely and universally ap- 
plied It would result not In the salvation but 
merely In the suicide of the race.^ Asceticism 
may be justified In certain Individuals or even 

1 The Roman Catholic way of escape from this is by di- 
viding Christian life into two grades — the higher saintly rule 
of asceticism (including abstinence from narriage), which is 
the 'religious' life, and a lower 'secular' Christian life which 
is 'sufficient' for those in the world. This is an utterly non- 
Christian distinction, alien to the whole New Testament, 
which knows no distinction between a saint and a Christian. 



176 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

periods, and it reminds the world that Christ 
demands surrender and sacrifice, but it is not 
in itself either a possible or a Christian general 
principle of life. On the other hand, it must 
be said that the modern treatment of this ques- 
tion is apt to be slight and easy, and often 
amounts to little more than the making of Jesus 
Christ a kind of Honorary President of art 
and letters and romance and other humane in- 
terests. This is but to play with the problem. 
Jesus Christ is nothing if He be not the Lord. 
His is not faintly to colour things with a Chris- 
tian or semi-Christian tinge; His is to com- 
mand — to be the supreme and final authority. 
'Where He comes,' as a hymn puts it, 'He 
comes to reign.' To speak of another Christ 
than this is indeed not so much to play with as 
rather to insult the gospel. The problem is to 
relate this Christ — the Lord — to the varied 
humanistic aspects of life which so loudly assert 
their own autonomy and which, it must be ad- 
mitted, are not easily annexed to the gospel. 
It is a problem to be dealt with certainly in a 
broader spirit than that which relegates God's 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 177 

beautiful world and the human nature God has 
given us to the territory of the Evil One; but 
not less certainly must It be dealt with In a more 
unmistakably and distinctively Christian way 
than that which assigns to Jesus Christ In any 
region of life a merely complimentary position. 

The few examples already given of the ques- 
tion before us divide Into two classes, and these 
are entitled to be distinguished and separately 
discussed. The claim for an extra-Christian 
autonomy for individual and subjective ends 
such as love or freedom (in the personal sense) 
or happiness is one thing; another is when that 
is claimed for such general objective ends as 
artistic beauty or scientific truth. I shall con- 
sider first the one and then the other of these; 
in both cases let us try to deal with the matter 
not as an academic argument about an abstrac- 
tion called life, but as it is proved in living ex- 
perience. 

When we look in this way at cases of the 
former class the answer is not far to seek, for 
life itself supplies It with unmistakable clear- 
ness. Nothing is in life more certain than this, 



178 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

that for the individual to reject all Christian 
or other authority in order to give such things 
as happiness or freedom or love their uncon- 
trolled and absolute autonomy is the direct and 
certain road to failure and disaster. I propose 
to look at this more particularly in connection 
with the last named — a topic on which it is 
easy to write foolishly and falsely, but a thing 
of profound influence in human lives and per- 
haps the best illustration for our discussion. 

Love — the word being used here in its popu- 
lar sense — is the theme of much literature, 
including nearly all novels. Well, if we read 
almost any batch of representative modern 
novels — not excluding even morally unprofit- 
able ones, if they are true — which deal power- 
fully and seriously with the story of lives which 
have made this an absolute directing law of 
conduct, what do we find? I think we find that 
hardly a book of genuine authority and con- 
vincingness does not in the end make this lead 
to disaster. That disaster, be it noted, may 
not be always an immediate unhappiness. But 
it will mean — as so surely it does in life — a 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 179 

soul that dwindles away from nobleness and 
gets smaller and meaner with the years. This 
is the moral not only of one kind of writer or 
one type of character but of all really worth 
counting. It is the moral of the career of a 
distinguished being like Anna Karenina as 
much as — I apologise to her most humbly for 
placing her even for a moment in such low 
company — that of any of Mr. Hitchen's de- 
generates. Now it is certainly no theological 
or moral orthodoxy which makes such books 
end thus. It is just life. For life says two 
main things about this human passion. One is 
— and let poets and novelists to the end of 
time celebrate it with all their powers — that 
here is Das irdische Gliick, concerning which 
the heart that knows it says, as of nothing else 
that is human: 'I have lived.' The other thing 
Is that therefore to Isolate this in an autonomy 
for life and make it a sole law unto itself is 
Inevitably to ruin It. Indeed, love can be Itself 
and its highest only when it is related to and 
regulated by other parts of the organism of 
life. Mr. Stephen Phillips in his Paolo and 



i8o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Francesca — ^by no fltieans a proround treatment 
of an immortal theme — makes the lover In the 
climax of his passion say: — 

'Now all the bonds 
Which held me I cast off — honour, esteem, 
All ties, all friendships, peace and life itself: 
You only in this universe I want.'^ 

A cavalier poet^ knew something truer than 
this who wrote what I will call the finest couplet 
that chivalry ever inspired: — 

*I could not love thee, dear, so much 
Loved I not honour more.' 

If Anna Karenina, with all her intelligence of 
understanding and all her capacity of feeling 
and sensitiveness to life, could have but known 
this too, her bright spirit would not have gone 
out in the darkness of that tragedy at the rail- 
way station in Moscow, which we still read with 
a pain and horror as If It had happened — as, 
Indeed, did it not? — to a personal friend. 
This, then, Is a plain fact of life and of the 

1 Paolo and Francesca, Act iv, 

2 Richard Lovelace. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM i8i 

bcit literature about life — that to make such 
things as those which have been named abso- 
lute and autonomous is to defeat and destroy 
them. And the reason of this fact is also plain, 
and indeed has been already given. It is that 
life is an organic unity, and no part of it can 
be made absolute in it without confusion and 
contradiction. If we make one thing the whole 
thing, then the whole will assert itself in re- 
action. This is precisely what life does to the 
man or woman who makes individual freedom 
or happiness or love a thing by itself, separate 
from life as a whole, and a single and absolute 
law: life reacts on any one who does that and 
defeats these very ends. Here, one may take 
the occasion to remark, is the ruinous untruth 
in that specious justification for yielding to 
what is called carnal temptation, which tells 
people that to do so is only to obey the nature 
which has been given them. This kind of sug- 
gestion — which perhaps few avow but more 
than a few feel and some find difficult to an- 
swer — has its element of truth as all dangerous 
lies have. Its truth is that these instincts have 



1 82 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

their natural basis in the body, which is part — 
and a most important part — of human nature. 
But the untruth lies in treating the part as if 
it were a whole. These instincts are not in 
human nature by themselves, that they may be 
allowed to roam and rage and reign as if re- 
sponsible only to themselves and isolated from 
the rest of what makes man. The body, there- 
fore, is not to be obeyed when it speaks alone; 
what is to be obeyed is the whole man. And 
man, while a carnal (the word is used with 
no theological animus but simply in its gram- 
matical sense), is also a rational and moral 
and social being. If he is to listen to the call 
of his flesh he must listen to it along with the 
reason and conscience and also his responsi- 
bilities to other persons. Obey yourself cer- 
tainly; but your whole self. Else, as I have 
said, life, which is a whole, will react on you 
to your ruin. 

What is the next point for us to examine is 
now clear. It obviously is to gain some direct- 
ing idea as to what or where is our real as 
distinguished from our false or partial self. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 183 

Here may come in the comment which I said 
I would make on the quotation given a few 
pages back from Mr. Shaw, about a young 
woman 'determined not to murder her own 
instincts,' to whom Mr. Shaw has nothing bet- 
ter to say than that by all means she should be 
as wicked as she can, for it is 'precisely the 
same experiment' as being as good as one can. 
Now it would be an unjust and unintelligent 
criticism to read this as a direct invitation to 
go — if the colloquialism be pardonable — to the 
bad. It reads like that, and — what is much 
worse — many persons will read It thus ; and in 
this respect it is an Illustration of how Mr. 
Shaw, himself a moralist, seems to think it 
amusing to recommend his message of morality 
by means of a vocabulary of vice. But the 
author's point, I take it, is that the girl should 
get free of all merely external moral con- 
straints and that her morality must be her own. 
This is not only a true but even a Christian 
idea, though, I must add, somewhat success- 
fully disguised. Certainly all really moral 
conduct is from within. But Mr. Shaw seems 

13 



1 84 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

to think this is enough, and he stops here. He 
considers that if conduct be thus inward in its 
spring and motive, it does not matter about its 
ethical quahty. One man's nature has a pas- 
sion for goodness : let him be good. Another's 
has the passion for badness: let him be bad. 
'It is precisely the same experiment.' The 
mere freedom is everything. Now this is in 
practice to give a general licence to pande- 
monium, but I do not emphasise that at present. 
What I want to say of it here is that it is no 
true theory of life. For life is direction as well 
as freedom. Without the former, the latter is 
not only dangerous but meaningless. It is 
telling a man to drive fast and not telling him 
where to drive. Humanity is not simply a right 
to realise yourself but also a right self to be re- 
alised. Augustine knew that as Mr. Shaw does 
not, and the old doctor said a greater and wiser 
and more complete word than the modern 
dramatist when he said : 'Dilige et quod vis fac/ 
Here is the 'do as you propose' just as in Mr. 
Shaw; but here is also, and first, the end and 
object — and, of course, Augustine means that 



THE CLAIM OF HUxMANlSM 185 

the love of God and good Is the end. This Is 
freedom with direction in It — with meaning in 
it. Any counsel which omits this Is counsel 
only for beings less than man, for man Is a 
being with an end, a self, which he Is to find, 
create, achieve. Mr. Shaw's counsel might be 
quite suitable for creatures who have neither 
ideal nor aspiration, but who are just what they 
are. Yes, I think I know the kind of creatures 
he should have addressed his words to — the 
trolls! In one of Ibsen's plays, these are a 
tribe of beings that live a seml-brutlsh life, 
with gusty passions and capricious Impulses; 
and this life is all their ideal, for they have no 
wish to live the lives of men. As one of them 
puts it: — 

'Among men the saying goes, "Man, be thyself!" 
At home here with us, 'mid the tribe of the trolls, 
The saying goes, "Troll, to thyself be — enough." ' ^ 

'Never mind,' says Mr. Shaw to the young 
woman, 'about being your true self; "be" to 
your dominant gust of Instinct, whatever It is: 

^ Peer Gynt, Act ii. sc. vi. 



1 86 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

that is enough.' This is mere trollism. It is 
^enough' for that tribe; it is not enough for 
human beings. It is philistine to offer men and 
women this crudity in the great and sacred 
name of freedom. But, as I sought to be just 
to the quotation, I would also not be unjust 
to the author. It may be that Mr. Shaw needs 
to be encouraged to think of himself more 
highly than apparently he does. Let him, then, 
be assured that he is not without talents which 
make him entitled to be an instructor of human 
beings; for it were to be regretted if any one 
of whom this can be said is satisfied, through 
any excess of modesty — beautiful to behold as 
that is in a writer in this age when so many 
trumpet themselves — with the poor post of be- 
ing a teacher merely of the tribe of the trolls. 
With this word of cheer I leave Mr. Shaw 
and pass on to our question of what is our true 
and complete as distinguished from a false self, 
and I shall say at once what is the main and 
indeed the only thing I have to say. There is 
absolutely no one with whom this question can 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 187 

be considered comparable to Jesus Christ. He 
is no teacher of the tribe of the trolls. 'In Him 
was life, and the life was the light of men.' 
Many and many a calamitous conception of 
human life has been theirs who have formed 
their idea of it apart from Him; never, never 
have regrets gathered in ^he end in the mind 
of any one who learned the thought of his true 
self from Jesus Christ. This Is not something 
generally true of human life at large. It is 
most personally verifiable and verified In the 
Individual mind and conscience. When any one 
of us really will bring his life into the presence 
of Christ, he gets not merely a new thought of 
God but also, and perhaps more indisputably, 
a new thought of himself. And this is not only 
— though frequently it is this to begin with — 
a realisation of his bad self in a sense of failure 
and sin; it is also a vision of his truer nature 
and of what his life should be and Is in the 
worthier thought of it. Jesus Christ Is in a 
marvellous way identical with a man's best self. 
This is as real a fact of moral experience as it 



1 88 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

is a real fact of religious experience, that when 
we have fellowship with Christ we have fellow- 
ship with even God too. What a wonderful 
Person is this, whom to know is to know God, 
and to whom to come is to come to one's very 
self! 

Here then we seem to be finding the answer 
to the question we set out to investigate, of 
how the great humanities of life, such as hap- 
piness and freedom and love, are to be related 
to Him who is called 'Lord of all/ In a word, 
the answer is this, these have to be related to 
this unity of the true self, and this true self 
finds itself in Christ. How this may work out 
with such things as those which have been 
named cannot, of course, be set down in general 
terms; for human life is nothing if not indi- 
vidual, and Jesus Christ is essentially a teacher 
and saviour of persons. But certainly it does 
work out in a way which justifies Christ's own 
assertion, that He comes not to destroy life 
but to give it more abundantly. A modern 
poet, in a remarkable poem, has expressed the 
fear it will turn out otherwise, and that a self 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 189 

given to Christ means a negation of the sweet 
humanities of life: — 

'Though I knew His love who followed, 

Yet was I sore afraid 
Lest having Him, I must have naught beside.'^ 

But an apostle says all things are ours when 
we are Christ's. Well, In life it must be tested. 
Test freedom thus or happiness — on the one 
hand, the doing whatever we 'propose' and the 
gratifying indiscriminately of our 'Instincts,' or, 
on the other, 'the faith, which experience will 
ratify In due time, that our desires are less the 
ministers than the destroyers of life until they 
are subdued Into glad obedience to His holy 
and hallowing will.'^ Take even love and test 
it thus, and see If this be not true In life — that 
the more room two hearts make for the loving 
and following of Jesus Christ, the more room 
they also make for the deepest and most lasting 
love of one another. I neither deny nor disguise 
another side to this — namely, that there are 
places in life where Christ may mean that some 

1 Francis Thompson, The Hound of Hewven. 

2 Ilort's The IVay, the Truth, the Life, p. 148. 



I90 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

human claim Is to be denied. And Is there one 
of us who does not know In his heart that this 
must be, and that a Christ who found In us noth- 
ing to curb and even cut away Is not any true 
Master or Saviour? But neither Is even this 
a mere negation of life. Where It lays claim 
on some natural liberty or enjoyment, It leads 
— when Christ Is In It — to a nobler freedom 
and a higher happiness; and even where It de- 
nies some demand of the heart. It can find, 
better than the poet, a love 'all breathing 
human passion far above,' ^ Here Is something 
which may sound unreal and mystical. It Is, 
however, the surest thing In the experience of 
many a Christian man or woman: of this one 
who has cast away many prospects to give his 
young life to some hard task for Christ's sake, 
and found thus an Incomparable liberty and 
joy; or of that one walking at Christ's call a 
lonely road, and never feeling except In dream 
the touch of the child that might have been 
hers, yet with a heart rich with love's deepest 
meanings and full of thankfulness for life. 

1 Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, iii. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 191 

*Les renoncements d!nn cceur consacre a Dieii 
sont peu de chose a cote des benedictions et des 
enrichissements dont toute dme pieuse fait la 
joiirnaliere experience.' ^ But this is something 
not too much to be talked about. It Is con- 
vincingly to be read not on any page of a book 
but In the lives — even In the very faces — of 
the bond-slaves of Christ. 

I now pass on to the second part of our 
question, and this must be dealt with more 
briefly. It Is plain, In the first place, that the 
relation of the law and gospel of Christ to such 
universal and objective ideals as scientific truth 
or artistic beauty is a wider one than that of 
such individual and subjective aims as those 
we have been considering. These general 
ideals are truly of God, and the promotion of 
them is a part of His praise and service. They 
are fundamentally religious, and it is not in- 
conceivable how they even may seem worthy 

1 Qu'est-ce que le Christianismef Reflexions d'un pasteur 
la'igue, par Louis Goumaz, p. 138. (This book contains a 
critical examination of The Fact of Christ; and it is a pleas- 
ure to quote from a critic who is always courteous and ap- 
preciative to a writer with whom he is not always in agree- 
ment.) 



192 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

rivals to a religion of personal piety. It Is 
Indeed Important to remember that religion Is 
of wider scope than merely human good or 
human need — though out of these human 
things it may have arisen In history — and that 
not merely the soul of the Christian but 'the 
whole earth' Is 'full of the glory of God.' So 
when science Is Investigating and art depicting 
and Interpreting the world, It is indeed declar- 
ing God's glory which is in it, and His Name 
who is, In the words of the first article of the 
Creed, God the Father Almighty, maker of 
heaven and earth.' Certainly In this is some- 
thing much more than an individualistic pursuit 
of selfish freedom, happiness, or passion. The 
relation to religion of servants of the Creator 
like Darwin or Watts must not be mixed up 
with the claims of neurotics and anarchists who 
know neither the true God nor the true man. 
I shall endeavour to consider this second part 
of our problem (as we did also the first part) 
practically; but one remark of a speculative 
character may be made at this point, as we 
begin to ask what is the relation of such things 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM i 



93 



as science and art to religion. We may natu- 
rally think that these may be related to religion 
in a general theistic sense since God is the 
Creator, but that they are not immediately or 
essentially to be related to the specifically 
Christian gospel of Jesus Christ. Now cer- 
tainly Christianity is characteristically a human 
salvation. But the boldest and loftiest Chris- 
tian thinking has not therefore been content 
to say that it is no more than this, but has 
claimed for Christ a cosmical as well as a 
soterlologlcal meaning. In St. Paul, Christ Is, 
as well as the saviour of men, at once the apxy 
(or first principle) and the re'Ao? (or final end) 
of the created universe. 'All things were cre- 
ated unto Him' — that Is, with a view to Him 
— and all things are 'summed up In Hlm;'^ and 
this high doctrine has Its place In the Creed 
of NIcaea, which asserts the cosmical Christ, 
'by whom all things were made, both things In 
heaven and things In earth,' prior to Its asser- 
tion of the soterlologlcal Christ 'who for us 
men and for our salvation came down' and so 

1 Colossians i. 20; Ephesians I. 10. 



194 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

on. It is true that Christian thought — espe- 
cially in the West, where the Church has been 
occupied mainly with the thought of God in 
His saving relation to man — has not kept very 
firm hold of this conception nor fruitfully de- 
veloped it. On this Lightfoot's words are not 
irrelevant to our present discussion: — 

'How much our theological conceptions suffer In 
breadth and fulness by this neglect, a moment's 
reflection will show. How much more hearty 
would be the sympathy of theologians with the rev- 
elations of science and the developments of history, 
if they habitually connected them with the opera- 
tion of the same Divine Word who Is the centre 
of all their religious aspirations, It Is needless to 
say. Through the recognition of this Idea, with all 
the consequences which flow from It as a living 
influence, more than In any other way, may we 
hope to strike the chords of that 'Vaster music" 
which results only from the harmony of knowledge 
and faith, of reverence and research.'^ 

On the other hand, one must observe that it 
is easier to write in a general and rhapsodical 
way of a doctrine of this speculative character 
than to state the data of reason, history, or 

1 On Ctlossians, p. ii6. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANlSxM 195 

experience on which it can be based; and if 
theology wishes to retain its status as a science, 
it must always have data for its dogmas. Dr. 
Denney says of such words as those of St. Paul 
which have been quoted, that when they assert 
Christ as the key of creation it is 'not science 
but wisdom.'^ I am inclined — since wisdom 
suggests something experiential — rather to 
speak of it in the way Plato speaks of poetry, 
which he says is written 'not by wisdom but by 
a kind of genius or inspiration.'^ And the 
genius or inspiration at the root of this superb 
thesis of faith is of the right 'kind,' for it is 
this — that we cannot err in the direction of 
thinking too magnificently of Jesus Christ and 
His place in the universe. Perhaps, then, of 
this article of the Creed one may say, improv- 
ing on Tertullian, Credo quia magnificentissi' 
mum! At any rate — and not to dwell longer 
on what is speculative — we may here apply this 
thought practically. Let us, therefore, in our 
discussion, consider the relation of such things 

1 The Way Everlasting, p. 24. 

2 Apology, 22. 



196 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

as science or art to, not religion in some general 
theistic sense, but specifically to the law and 
gospel of Jesus Christ, and ask what He means 
for these great areas of human interest. To 
this I now turn, though, as I have said, to 
touch on it in the briefest way. 

For the sake of brevity, and also clearness, 
I shall again treat chiefly of one example. As 
in the former section I took love, let me here 
take art.^ We are all familiar with the dictum, 
*Art for art's sake.' It is or was a kind of 
flag for those who would fight against attempts 
on the part of morals — especially conventional 
or puritanical morals — to lay down limiting 
rules about the subjects art should deal with 
or the way in which it should deal with them. 
And in that sense it was legitimate enough. 
Art has a perfect right to object to be made 
the handmaid of the moralist. Yet this phrase, 
'Art for art's sake,' is a very inadequate one. 
The truth rather is that both art and morals 
are means — not either a mean to the other but 

^ Art Is a large subject, and what follows may seem to some 
readers not equally applicable to all phases of It. All that can 
be attempted here is a general indication of a position. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 197 

both ministers to a greater common end. This 
end is simply life itself. The work of art (in, 
that is, its higher forms) is not something 
merely self-related but is to express life. It 
expresses it not in the dull, didactic way of 
the scientist or the philosopher or the preacher, 
but by making us see it and feel it as the living 
thing it really is. We say of a great artist's 
works that they are 'living,' and through these 
we live too with a quickened perception and 
a heightened emotion. Instead, therefore, of 
the narrow and party formula that 'art Is for 
art's sake,' we must use the larger and only 
true formula, that art is for life's sake/ 

Now whenever we say this we are already, 
without more preliminary words, at the heart 
of the answer to our question of the connection 
between art and the gospel. This connection 
is not that of a restrictive moral censorship. 
It Is something far more fundamental. Art, 
we say, Is for life's sake. Well, life Is a new 

^ It is since writing the above that I have noticed that this 
last phrase is used as the title of one of the essays in Mr. 
Arthur Ransome's recent volume, entitled Portraits and Specu- 
lations, 



198 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

thing since Jesus Christ. Humanity has gained 
a new vision of what human life is — and even 
what the life of nature is — from Him. And 
so art, whose business is to express life, has 
everything to do with what is Christian. This 
is not a merely theoretical proposition; one of 
the great pivot facts in the history of the 
human mind is how a deeper view of life and 
of nature has been given by Christianity to the 
whole spirit of man. That is a shallow and 
biassed reading of the subject which fastens 
only or even chiefly on the iconoclastic hostility 
to art characteristic of some periods of early 
Church history. Such hostility existed; and 
much of it was justifiable as an act of war — 
and in war many violent things are necessary — 
against vice, with which the art of those days 
was in open and systematic and intimate alli- 
ance. But every intelligent and unprejudiced 
student either of art or of history knows these 
iconoclastic acts were mere incidents, and that 
the really great influence which Christianity 
had towards art was to make it new because, 
as has just been said, it made life new. It is 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 199 

enough on this to quote a few words from an 
eminent writer on art who is free from any 
Christian bias. Says John Addlngton Sym- 
monds : — 

'At the same time, humanity acquired new facul- 
ties and wider sensibilities. A profounder and more 
vital feeling of the mysteries of the universe arose. 
Our life on earth v\^as seen to be a thing by no 
means rounded In itself and perfect, but only one 
term of an infinite and unknown series. It was 
henceforth impossible to translate the world into the 
language of purely aesthetic form. The striving of 
the spirit marks the transition from the ancient to 
the modern world.' ^ 

Here Is the whole world of difference between 
us and that art of ancient Greece which, In its 
sphere, is so incomparable that even its secon- 
dary achievements have no rival to-day. In 
a sense, we can never wonder enough at Hellas; 
and there are invaluable things which the 
human mind — not in relation to art only but 
for life — must ever learn and relearn at that 
source. Yet this world — to which Christ has 
come — can never again be only Greek, and the 

1 The Greek Poets, i. 434. 

14 



200 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

art which truly expresses our life must be more 
than any pre-Christian art, however, consum- 
mate its genius/ Thus is it that the Sistine 
Madonna has something which is in no statue 
of a Greek goddess, and in a picture of Millet 
is a meaning that is not in the pastoral on the 
urn of Keats's superb ode. Nothing would be 
more interesting than to illustrate this in fur- 
ther detail, but I must not allow my pen this 
pleasure now. 

Out of this, one thing arises which may be 
mentioned in a word before this chapter closes. 
I think it now appears that the protest against 
what is merely sensual and immoral in art has 
more philosophical justification than at first 
sight appears. For it is a protest in the name 
of that *life' which art is made to serve. Life 
in the truest and deepest sense is not merely 
not expressed, but is actually defaced and de- 
nied by an art which appeals only or mainly 

1 This is essentially what the finest modern spirits who have 
been under the spell of the Greek genius find true. We see 
this, for example, in the development of Keats's mind or, in 
a later day, in Pater. An example of a man who refused to 
admit this is Oscar Wilde; and his work is absolutely un- 
Greek, while of his life I will not speak. 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 201 

to the grossness of fleshly appetite. And no 
plea of beauty can atone for this, for 'beauty 
is truth' — truth not merely of line and colour 
and form, but of deeper things too. Nor is 
it enough to say that some genius has done it, 
and therefore 'the light that led astray was 
light from heaven;' for, as is most justly re- 
marked by a writer whom I have already 
quoted in this chapter and elsewhere, 'it is not 
genius which is made in the divine image, but 
man,'^ and genius is rather something man is 
to control and make his servant. I cannot here 
enter into the many undoubtedly difficult ques- 
tions which are thus raised in practical life, 
and I state merely this general position. On 
the one hand, I repudiate Mrs. Grundy and 
her ways. On the other, I say art is responsible 
to life, and therefore an art which degrades life 
by expressing only its sensuality — or similarly, 
a science which does so by hardening the spir- 
itual sense into a materialistic contempt for 
man — has about it something radically false. 
It is indeed a treachery against life. And the 

1 Denney's The Way Everlasting, p. 97. 



202 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

protest against it which arises instinctively in 
every healthy mind is, even if often wrongly 
expressed or based on untenable grounds, es- 
sentially a true protest in the name of life, of 
which art is a minister and of which the rightful 
Lord is Christ. 

This whole subject of Christ and humanism 
opens out in manifold directions rather than 
converges towards a conclusion the longer one 
discusses it, and I shall therefore bring this 
chapter to a close abruptly. I close it by re- 
calling a remark from, I believe, a French 
writer (but I am sorry I am unable to give the 
reference), to the effect that a man needs to 
be twice converted — first from nature to grace 
and then back again to nature. There is in 
this both philosophy and Christianity. The 
reason why so many of even the greatest men 
are not complete in their greatness is that they 
lack one or other of these two experiences. 
Goethe was a great man — indeed, he often is 
instanced as the complete man; but, just because 
he never was converted from nature to grace, 
there are great tracts of human experience, and 



THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 203 

these the highest and deepest the soul of man 
has known, which he neither represents nor 
indeed could appreciate. Pascal was a great 
man, a man of dominating intellect and of 
eminent soul; but, while he certainly passed 
through the first of these conversions, it was 
hardly so in his case as regards the second, and 
his Christianity — magnificently conquering as it 
was for himself — would have been more con- 
vincing and adequate for others if it had had 
more unity with what is true in reason and 
natural in life. Is not the sum of the matter 
this? God has given man two great gifts. 
One is life, with all its interest and sweetness 
and worth. The other is His 'unspeakable 
gift,' Jesus Christ. These gifts are from God. 
They are for man. Let man take both from 
Him. There is the complete man. That and 
that only is ^Im Ganzen zu lehen! I know 
there is danger in saying this; truth and love 
are always things which we can abuse if we 
will. But there is no danger if we take life 
from God and if we take Christ as fully as 
we take life. 



yi 

THE VETO OF DEATH 



'The Oriental fable of the traveller surprised in the 
desert by a wild beast is very old. 

'Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the 
traveller jumps into a well with no water in it; but at 
the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with 
open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not 
daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, 
not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be de- 
voured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild 
bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. 
His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give 
way to certain fate ; but still he clings, and sees two 
mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round 
the bush to which he hangs and gnawing off its roots. 

'The traveller sees this and knows he must inevitably 
perish; but, while thus hanging, he looks about him 
and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. 
These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off 
with rapture. 

'Thus I hang upon the boughs of life.' 

LEO TOLSTOY. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE VETO OF DEATH 

The chapter just concluded dealt with the 
positive of human life; this chapter must deal 
with life's great and final negative. The theme 
may be less attractive than the other, but it Is 
inevitable. No philosophy of life is adequate 
or even honest which speaks only of life's 
fruition and which shuts its eyes to the other 
side of it. This warm, living world, with its 
sweetness and interest, is true ; but true also — 
a simply undeniable fact of experience — is the 
cold, dead grave with all that declines thereto 
as life goes on. A true philosophy must look 
both these truths full in the face. We have 
been looking at life; we must now look at 
death. It is not morbid to do this; It Is only 
truthful. 

But If this, then, be an inevitable chapter in 
any frank discussion of the facts of experience, 

207 



2o8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

it may and should be not an involved one. The 
crucial question is a perfectly plain question 
which awaits a simple answer. There is indeed 
something not merely utterly futile, but also 
palpably false, in multiplying words about 
death. The act of death is nature's almost 
simplest deed. When the human mind sets 
itself to express what death is, it strains itself 
almost to exhaustion. In literature, Newman's 
Dream of Gerontius makes it a most elaborate 
business. But we do not take so long to die 
as that. In music, Strauss's Tod und Verkld- 
riing builds up and up and up a stupendous 
structure of sound to utter the tremendous word 
of dissolution. But this tremendous word, 
nature utters every hour without even raising 
her breath. Even when a great man dies, 
is it so. Here is the record from Mr. Glad- 
stone's biography: — 

*On the early morning of the 19th, his family all 
kneeling round the bed on which he lay in the 
stupor of coming death, without a struggle he 
ceased to breathe. Nature without — wood and 
wide lawn and far-oif sky — shone at her fairest.*^ 

- Motley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 528. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 209 

When one thinks of all the elements — Intellec- 
tual, moral, spiritual — that combined to make 
a personality such as Gladstone's, Is there not 
something silencing in the almost triviality of 
that negative which ends it all and the casual- 
ness of it in the order of things? 

*Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta 
pulveris exigui iactu compressa quiescent/'^ 

High-sounding words, then, are In this chap- 
ter out of place. Fine writing would be a trans- 
parent folly. Sometimes an inflated orator 
thinks death a grand theme for the exercise of 
his powers; but there is In that last silence what 
makes him seem to be speaking in a dumb 
show. What does it avail what eloquent per- 
sons say about death? Has any one anything 
to say to it? Who will answer it? Who or 
what will take from It the right of having the 
last word? This is the one thing that matters, 
and, if it can be met at all, it can be met with 
plain and few words. 

1 Virgil's Georgics, iv. 86-7. ('These tempests of the soul, 
these Titanic struggles, are quelled and laid to rest by a little 
handful of scattered dust.') 



2IO THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Something, however, seems called for on the 
prior point of whether and how far this veto, 
or apparent veto, of death is a challenge to 
faith which presses on the mind — even the 
earnest and Christian mind — of to-day. Is it 
not the case that men's thoughts, even within 
the areas of belief, are hardly at all occupied 
with any question of what is beyond death, but 
are engrossed — one may say exclusively — with 
questions of the life that now is and how this 
is to be elevated and saved? Indeed, is not 
this intent interest in the bettering of this 
present world felt as really a higher and nobler 
aim than the concern about personal immor- 
tality? That the modern mind, even within 
the Church, is bent as these queries suggest, is 
plain; and it may therefore seem that the con- 
sequence is that the question of this chapter 
is not so inevitable as has been said, but has 
indeed even lost much of its interest in face 
of more immediate and practical interests of 
the Kingdom of God on earth. This is a tend- 
ency which deserves a few moments' examina- 
tion. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 2 1 1 

In the first place, It is to be said that in the 
modern engrossment of heart and mind with 
this world there is much that is true and even 
noble, and it is a deserved rebuke to any spuri- 
ous and selfish *other-worldliness* which cared 
only about its own soul's future. Of course 
this engrossment may most easily serve a sheer, 
shallow worldliness — an absorption of body, 
mind, and soul with ephemeral pleasure or 
gain, which leaves neither the desire nor the 
capacity to think seriously of life's real issues 
and final destinies. Of this, I do not speak 
here. But, on its better side, this modern 
tendency of thought is often a noble engross- 
ment with this world — a desire to make re- 
ligion practical and a devotion to the service 
of humanity. Perhaps never than in our age 
were such desire and devotion stronger in many 
hearts. That this spirit should feel so keenly 
how much there is in the conditions of human 
life in this world which demands the attention 
of conscience and mind and heart and life, as 
to make It disregard any thought of another 
life is not unintelligible, and Is something which 



212 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

even religion has not always the right to cen- 
sure. Yet, intelligible and, in some sense, even 
pardonable as this point of view is before the 
calls and claims of the world around us, I ven- 
ture to suggest there lies in this tendency a 
grave danger even to this very passion to pro- 
mote the Kingdom of God on earth. Let me 
try to show how this is so. 

The social redemption of humanity in this 
world is a mighty task. It is a task which will 
never be accomplished without immense energy 
and devoted service from man for man. This 
energy and service will not be given except 
under the constraining power of a profound 
and permanent motive adequate for these ends. 
And what I want to suggest is that one of the 
deepest and even indispensable elements in a 
motive adequate for the energy and service 
necessary for the redemption of humanity is 
this — the sense of the infinite value of man. 
This, and not less than this, is why humanity 
is worth saving, should be saved, must be saved 
at any cost. Motives less than this — human- 
ism, kindness, altruism — will do a good deal 



THE VETO OF DEATH 213 

for humanity; but they will not do everything. 
Those impulses will begin plans for humanity's 
betterment; but — this, I think, is often to be 
observed in life — they somehow rarely have in 
them to carry their service out even to the end. 
Now, I do not assert that there will be found 
this constraining conviction of the infinite value 
of man only along with the conscious belief in 
personal immortality. But that where there is 
a consert to forego or ignore the latter, the 
former will retain its force is impossible. This 
is not the forecast of prejudiced orthodoxy: 
it is not denied by the most serious negative 
thought. The distinguished author of Ecce 
Homo puts it undisguisedly in these words: — 

The more our thoughts widen and deepen as the 
universe grows upon us, and we become accusfomed 
to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is 
the contrast of our own insignificance, the more 
contemptible becomes the pettiness, shortness, fra- 
gility of the Individual life. A moral paralysis 
creeps upon us. In a while we comfort ourselves 
with the notion of self-sacrifice; we say, What 
matter if I pass, let me think of others. But the 
other has become contemptible in less than the self: 



214 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, 
human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth 
increasing.' ^ 

These are sombre words. I do not wish to 
overstrain them or press the argument too far. 
I believe much service of man will always re- 
main despite any loss of faith in immortality. 
But the service which will give and save to the 
uttermost because it is serving and saving 
something of infinite value will hardly remain. 
And after all, this world will only be redeemed 
by men w^ho believe — believe in man if not In 
God. It will only be redeemed by those who 
are convinced man is worth saving, because 
there is about even the humblest and about 
even the worst something which outweighs and 
eternally will outweigh any sacrifice made on 
his behalf. I do not identify this conviction 
with a positive faith in personal Immortality, 
but I believe that experience, alike in the his- 
tory of peoples and in individual life, witnesses 
to their vital interrelation. 

One other remark may be made on the 

1 Seeley's Natural Religion, p. 251. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 215 

modern tendency to Ignore or minimise the 
importance of this question. It is notably 
ignored in much of modern literature even of 
the more serious kind, and in philosophy we 
find a wfiter of such a non-materialistic temper 
as the late Professor James admitting, in the 
act of writing upon immortality, that his feel- 
ing about it has never been of the keenest 
order,' and that It Is *a secondary point.' ^ 
Even in the religious teaching of to-day little 
Is said of any other world but this. In a sense, 
such reticence Is not altogether a loss, for this 
great theme should not be the subject of facile 
talk, and that It should become a topic for the 
^popular preacher' would be a kind of pro- 
fanity. Yet, despite all this avoidance of the 
question, I wonder If It really is ignored in 
men's and women's hearts. I do not believe 
It is. The pressure and poignancy of such a 
question as this are not a matter merely of 
the literary or philosophical or homiletical 
mood of the day. It rests on something far 

"^ Human Immortality (Ingersole Lecture), p. n; Varieties 
of Religious Experience, p. 524. 

15 



2i6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

deeper and more permanent than that. In 
lines which I think in a previous chapter I said 
are too famihar for quotation, but which I 
quote here as they are so obviously apt, Brown- 
ing has said, 

'Just when we 're safest, there 's a sunset touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides — 
And that 's enough for fifty hopes and fears.' ^ 

This — whether thus or otherwise expressed — 
is permanently true in human nature. To shut 
down this great question is to gag something 
in the human heart itself. And especially is 
this true of the heart which really knows what 
it is to love. It is impossible to love without 
thinking about death and what may be after. 
I am persuaded that here more than anywhere 
else does the whole question of immortality 
begin with many people to be a real question. 
What first awakens their minds to it is not 
some principle of philosophy or tenet of re- 
ligion: it is not any inability to conceive our 

1 Bishop Bl(nvgram's Apology, 



THE VETO OF DEATH 217 

own extinction, nor is it a fear of future judg- 
ment. Very often it is first awakened when 
they look on the face of their dear ones — 
either in life and realise how it is fleeting, or 
in death and protest against it that their love 
and fellowship are over for ever. This is as 
old as Plato: 'Many a man,' he says (or Soc- 
rates says) , 'has been willing to go to the world 
below^ animated by the hope of seeing there an 
earthly love or wife or son, and conversing 
with them.'^ It is as new as the father's heart 
or the lover's or the widow's to-day. Under 
this compulsion were the two great English 
poets of the later Victorian age called to face 
the question — Tennyson in In Memoriam, 
written after Arthur Hallam's death, and 
Browning in La Saisiaz, evoked by the sudden 
summoning of his 'companion dear and true,' 
just as she 'talked and laughed.' Love cannot 
bury this problem. An old song has the title, 
'True till death.' Only till death? It is such 
a little while for love ! For this reason count- 

1 Phaedo, 68. It is indeed as old as Homer ; Iliad, xxii. 
386 et sqq. 



2i8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

less hearts are not ignoring the great idea of 
immortality. 

But, however it may or may not be with 
regard to human nature in connection with an 
indifference to this topic — on which we cannot 
longer stay to say more — surely Christian faith, 
whenever it realises itself, cannot be indifferent 
to it, but must feel in death a direct and un- 
avoidable challenge. A single witness may suf- 
fice to show this. So strongly does St. Paul 
feel the challenge of death, that he actually 
declares that, without immortality, Christianity 
would be less a gospel than a misfortune, and 
that Christians would be *of all men most to 
be pitied.'^ This may seem an extreme saying, 
for surely, whatever the future may have or 
may not have, it is better to be a good man 
here than a bad, and live a Christian life than 
not. To which, I think, the great Apostle 
would answer somewhat in this wise. Better 
to be a good man than a bad even here — cer- 
tainly; that is a matter merely of morality, and 
morality is always its own sufficient justifica- 

^ I Corinthians xv. 19. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 219 

tlon. But do you mean only a morality when 
you speak of Christianity and even of a Chris- 
tian life? To be a Christian is something a 
great deal more than to be a man who tries to 
be good even according to the Christian ethical 
standard. To be a Christian is also — and in- 
deed first, for the ethical follows from this — 
that you can, through Christ, know and love 
your Father in heaven, and that He, in Christ, 
gives His love to you and bids you call Him 
'Father,' and promises to take up your life, 
even its sorrows and sins, and save you. Now 
all this is something far deeper, vaster, more 
than can be realised within the brief terms of 
a mortal life. Here it is but begun, as well as 
continually impeded. If then — so the apostle 
would conclude — all this is cut off by death 
after a few hampered years, that would leave 
the Christian indeed more pitiable than the 
pagan who had cherished no such passionate 
hope and therefore meets no such bitter defeat. 
I have put the above into St. Paul's lips less 
because it is his argument than because I do 
not dare to call myself a Christian in a sense 



2 20 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

spiritual enough to appreciate it at its fullness; 
but if we were really Christians — persons to 
whom to love and be loved by God in Christ 
is a passion and a possession — we should ap- 
preciate it and should feel that a gospel in- 
different about immortality was a kind of out- 
rage. That God shall call us 'friends' — and 
leave His friends to die ! 

And yet how dim it all seems! The Greek 
tragedian's words sound sometimes more real 
than the apostle's: 

*But if any far-off state there be 
Dearer than life to mortality, 
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof, 
And mist Is under and mist above ; 
And so we are sick for life, and cling 
On earth to this nameless and shining thing; 
The other life Is a fountain sealed 
And the deeps below us are unrevealed, 
And we drift on legends for ever.'^ 

'Legends!' Well, at least, we can deliver 
ourselves from that. Let us try to face the 
facts about death whatever they be. 

^Euripides, Hyppolitus, i. 189-97 (Gilbert Murray's trans- 
lation). 



THE VETO OF DEATH 221 

When, then, we turn to do this, we sec at 
once the palpable and hideous fact of dissolu- 
tion, and our minds are met with the plain 
assertion — so often maintained to be an em- 
pirical truth of science — that indisputably and 
indeed obviously, when the material organism 
of the body is dissolved, conscious life, which 
is a function or at least a concomitant of or- 
ganic structure, must cease. If this be fact, 
cadit quaestio. Whether or not it be fact de- 
pends upon a single and simple issue — the issue 
namely whether the conscious life of man is so 
related to the perishable physical organism 
that, if the latter be destroyed, the former 
must thereupon cease to be. This is a question 
which we must meet before we have the right 
to go further. 

It is obvious that the answer to this question 
depends on the kind of relation existing be- 
tween body and spirit, brain and mind.^ That 
there is a relationship between the two elements 
is indisputable, and it is, moreover, marvel- 

^ The substance of the argument of this paragraph is more 
fully developed in James's Human Immortality. 



22 2 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

lously subtle and Intricate — so much so that a 
physical movement is associated with every 
mental one. But things may be related to each 
other in more ways than one. Thus steam is 
related to a locomotive engine. It is so related 
to it that if you destroy the engine, there is an 
end to the steam. Why? Because the rela- 
tionship here is a causal one — the engine causes 
the steam to be produced. But take, say, a ray 
of light in a prism. The refraction and colori- 
sation of the ray of light are in manifest re- 
lation to the prism, and any movement of the 
latter is accompanied by a movement in the 
former. But if you destroy the prism you do 
not extinguish the light. Why not? Because 
the relationship here is not that of a cause — 
the prism does not cause the light to come into 
existence — ^but is rather that of a medium of 
one form of its manifestation. Well, then, 
the whole question of the possibility of the 
continuance of conscious life after the destruc- 
tion of the body is simply this — is the relation- 
ship of matter to spirit that of a cause as an 
engine's is to steam, or that of a medium as a 



THE VETO OF DEATH 223 

prism's Is to light? Now, the moment it is 
perceived that this Is the true statement of the 
question, then it Is also clear that no science 
has any mandate from known physical facts 
to declare Immortality Impossible. For no 
science has even the slightest Inkling of how 
matter and spirit are related. Why and how 
a movement of the molecules of the brain 
should accompany consciousness (or vice versa) 
Is a thing of which no kind of explanation Is 
available or even Imaginable. The nexus is — 
to use Tyndall's oft-quoted word for It — 'un- 
thinkable.' How then can you dogmatically 
assert that It Is a causal nexiisl But unless it 
be shown to be a causal nexus, unless it be 
shown not to be such a connection as, for ex- 
ample, that of a prism to light — supplying the 
medium for one form of its manifestation — 
then to proscribe the possibility of Immortality 
is to exceed any warrant from scientific facts. 
In contrast therefore to the unjustified dog- 
matism of writers such as Haeckel on this sub- 
ject, I shall quote one of the justest and sanest 
unbelievers since David Hume. 'There is,' 



224 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

says John Stuart Mill, 'no evidence in science 
against the immortality of the soul but that 
negative evidence which consists in the absence 
of evidence in its favour.'^ Science, then, has 
the right to be altogether agnostic on the ques- 
tion, even utterly sceptical, for there is nothing 
in the realm of physical science which suggests 
an answer in the affirmative. But there is cer- 
tainly nothing to authorise a dogmatic decision 
in the negative. 

This then clears the way for us to look at 
another aspect of man's being than the physical. 
For there are two aspects under which man's 
nature may be contemplated, and if one — the 
physical — suggests the limitation of finite and 
temporal existence, the other — the spiritual — 
certainly suggests what transcends it. Take 
the two things in the life of a human being 
which essentially differentiate it from the life of 
any other creature in the animal world. These 
are reason and morality. Both of these things 
are of more than sense and time. The rational 
life is. The intelligence that knows things in 

^ Three Essays on Religion: Theism, pt. iii. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 225 

time Is not and cannot be Itself merely of time, 
and Indeed there could not be for us such a 
conception as that of time unless we, who con- 
ceive It, stood above It. The moral life Is. 
The conscience neither seeks Its authority from 
the things of this world nor binds Itself to 
justify Its laws by them. Moreover, the alms 
which these rational and moral principles of 
his being set before man are alms which he 
knows are quite out of his reach of attainment 
within this finite life; the task of reason, which 
is to know the truth, and the task of morality, 
which is to realise the ethical Ideal, are alike 
incumbent upon us as men and Impossible for 
us as mortals. This, then. Is man in his spiritual 
aspect — a being who, If he will live the life 
which essentially and distinctively Is man's, must 
use categories of thought and obey principles 
of conduct which have alike their source and 
their satisfaction beyond the 'bourne of Time 
and Place.' In a word, man Is a being who, 
whether or not he actually Is Immortal, Is called 
on to live as If he were. 

It Is when we consider this essentially eternal 



226 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

element In human nature that we find that man 
is a being at least fit for more than this little 
span of life. As Dr. Martineau has said, 'were 
it the will of the Creator to change His arrange- 
ment for mankind, and to determine that they 
should henceforth live In this world ten or a 
hundred times as long as they do at present, 
no one would feel that new souls would be re- 
quired for the execution of the design.'^ Con- 
sider what this means. This soul of man — 
domiciled in time, but bid to live and fit to live 
for a reason and a morality which are of more 
than time — Is the supreme achievement of the 
whole process of nature. By a development, 
slow, stupendous, often terrible, evolution has 
worked unhastlngly, unrestingly towards this 
supreme achievement, man, the law of whose 
being Is that he does not only live for the de- 
mands of the finite — such as eating and drink- 
ing, self-defence, propagation of species, and 
so on — ^but also and above all by principles and 
for ends that are eternal. Now 'God and 
nature,' said Aristotle, 'do nothing In vain.' 

^ Martineau's Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 126. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 227 

That the whole process of life is rational, all 
science as well as all faith must hold as its first 
hypothesis. Is it, then, rational to evolve a 
being which is eternal in principle and yet 
doomed in fact to what is temporal? Is it rea- 
sonable to demand of man that he live as if 
he were immortal when. In reality, he Is not? 
Such questions involve far more than any mere 
desire on our part for another life. It is not 
that we desire it: rather is it that nature re- 
quires it if her work is not to be in vain. It 
is an argument from the rationality of things, 
and the reason which is in all the work of 
nature. *And thus,' says a well-known writer 
on evolution, 'I believe in the immortality of 
the soul not In the sense in which I accept 
demonstrable truths of science, but as a su- 
preme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
God's work.'^ 

This is the highest argument for human im- 
mortality, which can be adduced by reason 
looking at the question, as it were, from be- 
low upwards. We feel it most not when we 

1 Fiske's Destiny of Man, p. 6z. 



228 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

think of it abstractly as true of 'man/ but when 
we consider the passing of some great soul. 
It is this which gives its perennial impressive- 
ness to the incomparable scenes of the Phaedo, 
the great argument of which after all Is not 
any of Plato's speculations about the souPs 
connection with eternal 'ideas,' but Is Socrates 
himself. In modern literature, Browning's 
confident convictions and Tennyson's more 
wistful and yet unquenchable faith have the 
same basis. We all feel it. We all feel the 
Irony of the contrast between the body's decay 
and dissolution Into nothingness, and the 
growth and maturity of the soul and character 
within. Physical life Is a peau de chagrin — 
to use the figure of Balzac's famous tale — 
which shrinks and becomes smaller and finally 
vanishes; but moral life is not a peau de cha- 
grin^ and It is at Its greatest often when the 
other ends. There Is an Irony here which Is 
even an Irrationality, and it makes a strong 
plea In moral reason for Immortality. 

And yet, when all Is said, can our faith really 
stand on this In face of the great world? For 



THE VETO OF DEATH 229 

myself, I find It hard to think so. When we 
bring this out from the chamber of the mind, 
where it sounds full and strong, and repeat It 
in the vast halls of the universe, It seems to 
fall faint and flat upon the ear. Now, by this, 
I most distinctly do not mean that this or any 
other great spiritual conviction of the soul Is 
to be bullied Into timorous silence by the mere 
dead immensities of time and space. After all, 
man, as Pascal says, n^est qu!un roseaii, le plus 
faihle de la nature mais c'est iin roseau pen- 
sant} After all, mind will be found to be more 
than matter In the day of judgment. I abhor 
the materialism which would terrorise faith 
with vulgar Immensities of matter. It is not 
the dead Immensities before which this thought 
of immortality dwindles. It is the vastness of 
the reason of the universe. You tell me to 
believe In my personal continuance after death 
as an act of faith in the reason In nature's 
work. But what a large word that Is! We 
see the fringes of It in the story of the evolu- 
tion of man, of species, of worlds. Surely there 

1 Pensees, ii. x. 



230 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

may well be a reason for and in all that, and 
yet that reason hardly needs my eternal con- 
scious existence for its justification. Surely it 
is conceivable that the universe is rational even 
though 

'Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after 
many a vanished face, 

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with 

the dust of a vanished race.'^ 

Again let me make clear that it is not the mere 
immensity of the universe I am speaking of, 
but the immensity of the plan — the reason — of 
the universe. That world-reason evolved me 
and uses me, but not therefore does it need me 
eternally. It may use me, and be done with 
me, and pass on to wider ends. That were 
entirely rational; and, as we look at the facts 

^ Tennyson's Fastness, I. Having named both Tennyson 
and Browning on this subject, I may observe that the latter 
looks at the problem of immortality only in view of the indi- 
vidual, but the former feels the pressure upon it of the sense 
of the universe. For this reason Browning is the more as- 
sertive, and one might almost say 'cock-sure'; while Tennyson 
has another note in his faith, and one which is really deeper. 
Browning says things about immortality more strikingly than 
Tennyson ever does; but I am not sure but that the latter 
saw more about it» 



THE VETO OF DEATH 231 

of life, Is It not almost palpably the case? For 
if it be replied that this means the waste of 
what, after all, Is the greatest thing — personal 
spirit and character — I admit it. But is not 
this waste just one of the most appalling yet 
undeniable things in life? In an earlier chap- 
ter I mentioned this as one of the leading im- 
pressions which Shakespere's view of existence 
shows us; but the thoughtful mind does not 
need to go to Shakespere to feel It, for it is 
apparent every day, whatever may be said of 
it, that the order of this world Is consistent 
with constant waste of resources and frustra- 
tion of capacity. There are arrested organisms 
everywhere, and Indeed their very failure is the 
contribution they pay to nature's evolution to 
her further ends. In face of all this — all this 
sense of the universe and these facts of life — 
can we really lean our faith In personal Immor- 
tality upon its necessity in the rationality of the 
cosmic order, or even what, speaking more re- 
ligiously, we call 'the reasonableness of God's 
work'? I cannot find that anchor hold when 
one gets out to deeper waters and feels the 

16 



232 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

surges of the mighty seas. And yet, as Plato 
said long ago — all the fundamental and needful 
things about this question were said long ago — 
this is 'the best and most irrefragable of human 
theories,' and 'the raft upon which man sails 
through life, not without risk, as I admit, if he 
cannot find some word of God which will more 
surely and safely carry him.'^ 

What more then is to be said? Whither 
shall we turn our minds for that 'word' which 
may 'more surely and safely carry' us? Well, 
here we find ourselves once more in the position 
we reached in more than one of our previous 
discussions. In discussing, for example, pain, 
we found that many things were to be said 
about it which did cast a measure of illumina- 
tion upon it for faith ; but that in the end, and 
when there was no more to be said about it, 
we saw that a complete faith could be reached 
only if we could say something more, not about 
pain, but about God. It is so in this question 
also. We have been saying things about man 
— about, especially, that element in man which 

^Phaedo, 85. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 233 

is of more than time — and this does at least 
suggest the immortal hope ; but in the end what 
we must again seek is not so much something 
more about man as something more about God. 
What this is it Is not difficult to say. For what 
is it which is Inadequate for the assurance of 
faith in our personal immortality when we 
speak, as we have been doing, of the reason 
of God's work? It is just that, as has been 
indicated, this universal reason is a vast and 
general purpose to which I am not — at least 
necessarily — of personal and permanent value. 
What is lacking is the thought of God as not 
merely Reason related to some ultimate pur- 
pose 'to which the whole creation moves,' but 
as a Father related In eternal love and care 
to us His children — One who cares for us far 
too deeply and individually to lose hold of us 
in the darkness of the night. It is thus just 
the thought of God which Is brought to us in 
the experience of religion, and is made sure 
to us In Jesus Christ. 

This is the one firm basis for a faith in 
Immortality. It is not an argument from a 



234 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

philosophy of human nature, but an implicate 
in the religion which knows God as our Father. 
It is upon this experience of God, and not 
simply upon an analysis of the soul, that those 
great saints of past ages have taken their stand,, 
who have been able to pass from the wistful- 
ness of hope on this matter to the certitude of 
faith. Here lies the quite unmistakable differ- 
ence between the reasonings, even at their high- 
water mark, of the Phaedo, and the amazing 
sureness of the supreme utterances about im- 
mortality in the Book of Job or in the Psalms. 
What made Job say, 'I know that . . . after 
my frame is destroyed ... I shall, even dis- 
embodied, see God'?^ What made the writer 
of the seventy-third Psalm write so calmly, 
*Thou shalt afterwards take me to glory' ?^ It 
was not that these men were philosophers. It 
was not that they knew a great deal about the 
soul of man. It was that they knew that God 
was their own God — their Friend who had 
made Himself known to them — and they were 
safer in His hands than any child is in the 

^Job xix. 25, 26. ^ Psalm Ixxiii, 24. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 235 

hands of Its father. I shall express this further 
— for It Is Important though it Is simple — In 
the words of a great Old Testament scholar: — 

'This was the anchor of the Old Testament 
saints. They knew God, they had found Him. 
In His grace He had come near to them, and re- 
moved their transgressions from them. They had 
His fellowship. They walked with Him. They 
were His friends. They were even His children. 
He loved them — and He was life and He gave 
them life — and they felt it to be impossible that 
He should cease to love them, and therefore Im- 
possible that He could let them die. Here was 
then hope of eternal life — to know God. He 
could not break this tie of love between Him and 
them, for He loveth with an everlasting love. He 
could not let them ever go from His heart any 
more than a father could let go his child. "Can 
a woman forget her sucking child that she should 
not have compassion on the son of her womb? 
Yet these may forget, yet will not I forget thee." ' ^ 

Here, I say again, is the real and sure basis 
of a faith In personal immortality. That God 
loves me has as Its corollary that I shall not 
die In the dust. If the fellowship with God 

^ A. B. Davidson's Waiting upon God, p. 102. 



236 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

into which we are called through the gospel 
which is in Jesus Christ be true and real, then 
God pledges His love to us in a way which 
means more than a few years here can fulfil. 
There is thus no such thing as an argument for 
immortality in the sense of some logical propo- 
sition of physical fact which proves it. The 
argument for immortality is just the gospel. 

It might seem that one may stop here, and, 
indeed, that to seek more is to seek lower. The 
late Dr. Edward Caird, Master of Balliol, 
often insisted on this. To him 'the spiritual 
life is or ought to be its owa evidence,' and to 
connect it or in any way rest it on 'the believed 
fact of the Resurrection of Christ,' as the first 
apostles and even St. Paul (who 'more than 
any other penetrated to the spiritual meaning 
of Christianity') did, is to sink to the attitude 
of the Jews 'who demanded of Christ signs and 
wonders that they might believe on Him.' ^ It 
seems to me there is here both a truth and a 
confusion. The truth is what has already been 
said more than once — that the basis of faith in 

'^Evolution of Religion, ii. 239, sqq. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 237 

immortality is the spiritual life with God, and 
certainly for an unbelief which has not that 
basis to ask as its substitute a physical demon- 
stration would be open to the charge of seeking 
a mere sign or wonder. But it is not the same 
thing to say that this faith — its basis still the 
life lived with God — finds its fulfilment in Jesus 
Christ, who is come to be not merely a prophet 
but the end of prophecy. It is the latter which 
is the Christian position as regards the Resur- 
rection on Easter-day. This was not a sign 
given to unbelief to turn it into faith, but the 
completed word of God to a faith to which the 
victory over death was still but a promise, — a 
word given by Him 'in whom the promises of 
God are yea and amen.' That God, revealing 
Himself in Christ, should make good that 
promise may or may not be incredible, but has 
certainly nothing in it which is unspiritual, un- 
less indeed the whole idea of an historical reve- 
lation be unspiritual. It is easy for philoso- 
phers to take the attitude of being superior to 
the need for anything of this kind. They for- 
get they are living to-day after eighteen cen- 



238 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

turies of the Easter tradition. I will go so 
far as to say this — that but for Easter, faith 
in immortality would be only a rare and a 
sickly plant in the human mind. Certainly it 
would never have rung through the world as 
it did in the first Christian preaching. Con- 
sider what the Easter fact meant to faith in this 
respect. ^Surely/ said this one and that among 
great Old Testament saints before Christ, 
^surely God who loves us, and has called us 
into fellowship with Himself, does not and 
cannot leave us to die in the dust' But against 
this — to which after all only high souls like 
the author of the seventy-third Psalm attained 
— remained the persistent and unshaken witness 
of death. *The fathers, where are they? and 
the prophets, have they lived for ever?' The 
only answer is mors ultima linea rerum. 
Death simply went on, as it goes on with us. 
They buried their dead, as we bury them.* 
'The rest is silence.' Now faith might and did 
live through all this, for, in our imperfect lives, 
God does not yet fully reveal His love and 
power. But then came One whom these be- 



THE VETO OF DEATH 239 

lievers found — and we too find — reason to re- 
gard as Indeed the true and full and final reve- 
lation. Well, does even He fulfil this hope, 
so faithfully clung to despite such uninterrupted 
denial, that not death but life is God's last 
word with the children of His love? Or here 
too, with even the Veil-beloved Son of the 
Father,' is death still the ultima linea and the 
*rest' still ^silence'? If so, faith must just go 
back to the yet uncontradicted deed of death, 
with its great hope, not merely still unverified 
but discouraged as it never was before. 

*Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: 

As of the unjust, also of the just — 
Yea of that Just One tool 

This is the one sad gospel that is true.'^ 

I repeat I do not see much reason to think 
that if the last available fact about Jesus Christ 
had been the common terminus of the grave, 
the religious mind would — except, perhaps, in 
a few instances — have got over that. Cer- 
tainly faith would never have triumphed over 
it if the Church had had no Easter message, 

A. H. Clough, Easter Day, i. 



240 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

and If the New Testament were not, as it so 
conspicuously is, the Book of the Resurrection 
of Jesus Christ. 

Here I wish to say that it is to fail not only 
in charity but in justice to speak peremptorily 
to those whose minds are inhospitable to the 
story of the Resurrection, and are perplexed by 
obvious difficulties. I can quite understand a 
man saying that here Is something to which it 
is impossible to apply the tests of fact, and 
which has yet to be explained, or to find true 
forms of historical expression. I can sympa- 
thise with that. What I cannot sympathise 
with, and what I find it difficult to treat with 
any intellectual respect, is the flimsy account 
of the matter which is sometimes offered to us 
in the name of rational criticism. Here is a 
most interesting and a unique historical prob- 
lem — namely to give some rationale of the 
exultant gospel of the early Church. This is 
a fact, and — it should be remembered — a fact 
far older than any document of the Resurrec- 
tion story. Now do not tell me that men, who 
watched their Master's pallid head sink in 



THE VETO OF DEATH 241 

death, and who laid His lifeless form In the 
grave, got over the Impression of the reality 
and finality of that In a few days on the strength 
of this kind of thing: — 

* "He must come again!" The men whispered 
it and looked longingly at each other. "He must 
come again:" the lake whispered it, and the trees 
and the wind in the night about them in that region 
where He had been moving about only two weeks 
before. "I must see Him again," said Peter, who 
had denied that he had known Him. "If not, then 
I cannot live." 

* "Hark, didst thou not see something, Peter?" 
'The next day, the first rumour started.' ^ 

And so on. This, we are told (in the preface 
of the work from which the above Is taken), 
Is the start of the story 'as It has been Investi- 
gated by German scientific study.' A highly 
touched-up picture like this Is the last thing 
that has the right to call itself scientific history. 
It Is neither science nor history : It Is fancy from 
Its first line to Its last. To begin with, the only 
glimpse we have of the state of mind of the 
followers of Jesus after His death is not any- 

Gustav Frenssen's Story of Jesus, E. T., pp. 75-6. 



242 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

thing the least like this 'He must come again,' 
but is a quiet acceptance of it that all was over. 
*We trusted that it had been He who should 
have redeemed Israel;' we thought it would 
be, but it is not to be. I cannot call it anything 
else than an historical impertinence, calmly and 
without one scrap of evidence, to substitute for 
this convincingly genuine glimpse of the dis- 
ciples' mind, a purely fancy sketch of men 
whispering 'He must come again.' Further, 
even if Peter was in this pathetic, not to say 
neurotic, mood, is he the first man or the last 
who has yearned to see again a dead friend 
whom in life he had wronged? And would 
the love of those who thus yearned to see their 
dear Master be content to build on 'rumour;' 
would it not — just because it was love — make 
sure about it, exactly as you would if you heard 
a rumour that some one very dear to you, 
whom you thought had been dead, was yet 
alive ?^ And if there was a Peter (or a Mary 

^ In St. Luke xxlv. 22-4 we find disciples actually doing 
this; the result, since 'Him they saw not,' left them only 'sad' 
(v. 17) and in anything but the mood Frenssen depicts. 



THE VETO OF DEATH 243 

Magdalene) to start these rumours, was there 
not a Thomas to test them? Above all, were 
there not bitter and Influential enemies of the 
news, who, the moment It was proclaimed, as 
It Indubitably was at once, could prick the 
bubble In a day, not by arguing with or making 
martyrs of the apostles, but simply by exhuming 
the corpse? I do not here argue these points; 
they and many more have been argued many 
a time. The Inadequacy of the whole theory 
Is admitted by criticism Itself In the fact that 
It must be buttressed up by desperate aids such 
as Kelm's of a 'telegram from heaven' telling 
the disciples Jesus lived/ I repeat that I have 
sympathy with those who find in the Easter 
story something still to be told in adequate 
forms of historical expression; but I find noth- 
ing either to help to this or to respect historic- 
ally in the attempt (as a modern writer aptly 
put It) 'to discredit supernatural stories which 
have some foundation simply by telling natural 
stories which have no foundation.'^ This is 

1 Jesus of Nazareth, vi. 3 64. 

2 G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, p. 75. 



244 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Indeed to make history, as Carlyle calls it, *a 
distillation of Rumour.' For my part, I prefer 
my history neat. 

This has been somewhat of a digression; yet 
the Resurrection of Christ is historically so 
great a factor in Christian faith that a refer- 
ence to it here was essential. At the same time, 
I would not even seem to make this the basis 
of the Christian belief in a life greater than 
death. It is, as I have indicated, the fulfilment 
of a great hope as to that — 'Christ the first- 
fruits;' but the basis of Christian faith in im- 
mortality remains the love of God Who has 
called us unto His eternal fellowship. Socii 
Dei sumus. And even this is not the basis of 
the fact of immortality, for if so only believers 
and saints would be immortal, and that, as a 
phrase of Plato's puts it, Vould be to give 
the bad too good a bargain.' Napoleon said 
on his deathbed, N'est pas athee qui veut; and 
similarly may it be said not every one is mortal 
that would like to be. But it may seem that 
to base even faith in immortality — as distin- 
guishable from the fact of it — on the experi- 



THE VETO OF DEATH 245 

encc of fellowship with God means that only 
the saints can have a really sure hope as to 
the life eternal. How many of us can claim 
so deep a religious experience as to enable us 
to say we know God has pledged His love to 
us In a way which makes It Impossible for us 
to be left in the grave? Well, it is true that 
Immortality is not to be believed in lightly : In- 
deed, when it Is believed in lightly, It Is not 
believed in at all. Yet, we need not therefore 
say that only the saints can know it. For it 
is not only the saints whom the love of God 
has called Into fellowship with Himself. That 
God loves us, speaks to us, redeems us, keeps 
hold of us — all this may be not less surely 
brought home to us sinners. It is in the ex- 
perience of many who are far indeed from pre- 
suming to regard themselves as advanced in 
spiritual things. Therefore we too may dare 
to learn this sublime faith in the life greater 
than death which is pledged to us by God our 
Father. We may learn it as regards others — 
our dear dead whom we think of, perhaps, 
every day — and shall then, even when also sad, 



246 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

be expectant and even elate. We may learn it 
as regards even ourselves, learning it here, it 
may be, with something of that incredulous 
surprise with which once a thief on a cross, 
dying the bitter death and the blackness of 
night settling down upon his soul, heard the 
amazing assurance that he — he! — would enter 
Paradise. 



VII 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 



17 



'The action of Christ, who is risen upon the world 
which He has redeemed, fails not but increases.' 

LORD ACTON. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 

The discussions in the foregoing chapters have 
obviously not covered all 'facts of life' — no 
one in reason could expect that they should — 
but I trust that it has been found by the reader 
that the aspects of the problem raised for faith 
in life which have been dealt with are typical 
and also crucial aspects ; and further, that these 
have been dealt with, while certainly not ex- 
haustively, at least not evasively. Other di- 
rections along which similar discussions might 
be pursued at once suggest themselves. But 
I desire to bring this book — which, since the 
majority of things in the world of utterance 
are too long, shall avoid that fault to atone 
for whatever others it may exhibit — to a close, 
and I think this last chapter may more usefully 
be turned in a different direction. Christianity 
is not merely a fact of personal life; It is also 

249 



250 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

a fact of the life of the world. It is what the 
Germans call welt-historisch. It may therefore, 
be tested in the light of history, which is the 
most impartial of intellectual tribunals, and in 
relation to facts larger than the facts of the 
merely individual life. This more compre- 
hensive consideration of the problem of faith 
demands some attention before we close. 

Let us, however, particularise the issue 
within reasonable limits. I have no intention 
here — and it would be manifestly absurd to 
attempt it within a single chapter — to delineate 
the Christian philosophy of history or even to 
describe the witness of the Christian centuries 
to faith in any general way. Nor shall I dis- 
cuss the general relations between Christianity 
and the great civilisation into which it entered, 
nor even the historic theme of how it was the 
faith of Christ which saved civilisation from a 
despairing dissolution at that unparalleled and 
indeed appalling hour when the Roman Em- 
pire, sole trustee of the order of the world, was 
foundering in the shoals of time, not from any 
remediable breakdown of its constitutional 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 251 

machinery, nor from any lack of knowledge of 
essential political or even moral principles, but 
simply and literally because men, being without 
God and without hope in the world, were im- 
potent to carry on the greatness or goodness, 
and were preserving only the degradation and 
corruption of the past. Here are subjects 
which never lose their grandeur of interest for 
the student of the human drama — subjects, 
however, not to be attempted within the limits 
of this chapter. Our aim here must be some- 
thing very much simpler and also something 
nearer to hand. 

Let us, as in our previous discussions, take 
a few typical and crucial test points which may 
illustrate the verdict or comment of the cen- 
turies on the claim of Christian faith, and which 
may be answered without elaborate historical 
research. Especially let us take points which 
may be tested in the light of the present day. 
We are starting from the position that time 
tests things. It places men and movements as 
hardly anything else does; it adjusts their valu- 
ation. Especially does It reduce any exagger- 



252 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

ated estimates to their due proportions. Thus, 
as Bacon says, 'truth has been rightly named 
the daughter of time.' From this point of 
view, then, let us ask this question, what does 
to-day say of the estimate which faith has put 
alike upon the Master and upon the message 
of Christianity? Has the view that Jesus 
Christ is not merely one man in the world's 
population but the Lord and Saviour of all men 
been found out, by the test of nearly twenty 
centuries, to be an untenable exaggeration? 
Does the idea that the Christian gospel is in- 
deed the Word of God which endureth for 
ever and the absolute and final religion hold 
good in our modern world with its essentially 
modern problems? These are important ques- 
tions for faith; in dealing with them I shall 
try to take, as has been said, typical and crucial 
points which will test the issue. 

First, then, we shall ask what is the comment 
of time as regards the estimate of Jesus Him- 
self. This is primary, for Christianity is not 
a system but an attachment to a Person. Here 
we are concerned not with ecclesiastical dogma 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 253 

but with facts of life and of the world. Now, 
amidst all the doctrinal dubiety prevalent In 
the modern theological mind, there are facts 
about Jesus which are clearer to-day than ever 
they have been. From these I take one of most 
relevant interest for our question. 

It Is this. When Jesus lived on earth His 
followers declared of Him that 'He did no sin.' 
He Himself, indeed, is reported to have chal- 
lenged any one to convict Him of sin, and not 
even His enemies could take up the challenge. 
So *the sinlessness of Jesus' has always been a 
theme which has found a place in religious and 
theological thought. But there is something 
not very satisfying about such an expression. 
It is negative, and emphasises what Jesus was 
not rather than conveys any rich and living Idea 
of what He was. But the richness of what He 
was could not be perceived at once. It could 
not be fully apprehended by His contempora- 
ries. It is only as the ages have gone on, and 
as men of different epochs and different types 
have been brought into contact with Jesus, that 
the content of His personality has been made 



254 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

apparent. The result Is something far richer 
and most positive than anything which is ex- 
pressed by the mere negative of the word 'sin- 
less.' It is better expressed if we say that Jesus 
has proved to be the complete, the perfect 
humanity. Sinlessness excludes, and it excludes 
one element — that which is bad. But the com- 
plete or perfect humanity of Jesus includes 
everything which is good. He is not merely 
the supreme saint; He is the Son of Man. The 
ages, which in the case of every other great 
figure of the past discovers his limitations, in 
this case disclose a humanity which has no limi- 
tations but is an ideal and inspiration for man- 
kind in every age. Here is not a great Jew 
of the first century. Here is more even than 
a man: here is Man. 

All this may seem somewhat general, and 
the reader will ask that this completeness or 
perfection said to be in Jesus Christ should be 
stated in plainer terms as a fact in life and 
history. Well, it is a fact in life and history 
wherever Christianity has been genuinely ex- 
emplified that not one age only nor one type 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 255 

of character only, but every type (that Is, of 
course, which is not morally evil) in every age 
has learned its highest in the school of Christ. 
There is not In the whole range of human 
nature anything which Is good which is not 
strengthened, deepened, purified by contact 
with Him. His personality reaches past the 
dividing lines which separate humankind into 
classes and schools and sects. That this is so 
of merely social or educational or ecclesiastical 
divisions Is not wonderful; but He overreaches 
divisions far deeper than these. The deepest 
and most ineffaceable dividing lines that cross 
the area of human life are, I take it, race and 
sex. As to the former, Is it not true that Jesus 
Christ Is as much to the Christian In England 
to-day as He was to the Jews in Palestine who 
first called Him Master — so much so that we 
in England practically never think of Him as 
having been a Jew; and further, that He Is 
nothing more to the Christian in England than 
He Is to the Christian in the far Orient or in 
the heart of Africa? As to the latter of these 
dividing lines, is it not enough to say that 



256 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

womanhood no less than manhood, as manhood 
no less than womanhood, has found In Him its 
inspiration and ideal? These are plain facts 
of life and history which the centuries have 
proved to every candid mind. They mean a 
character to be described by some far more 
positive and opulent term than 'sinless.' Even 
'perfect' seems too vague and general a word. 
They mean a personality of which we must say 
this, that it is adequate for all humanity as its 
inspiration and ideal. There is no other who 
has been born of woman of whom anything 
even approaching to this may be said. There 
have been great men; there has been but One 
who is Man. 

About this a further thing is to be said which 
It Is of importance to say in view of modern 
philosophies which vehemently turn away from 
Christ for at least some ideals of character. 
What has been urged may seem to suggest that 
Jesus is a little of every one because not very 
pronouncedly any one thing in particular — that 
He is what, in Aristotelian phrase, may be 
called a 'mean,' rather than the ideal of any 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 257 

specific type of life, especially of the stronger 
kind. Nothing could be further from the truth 
than this. On the contrary, in Him and in 
contact with Him the varying elements in 
human nature — again, of course, which are not 
evil — come to their height. There is no abase- 
ment like the shame He evokes and no noble- 
ness like the honour He confers; none are so 
submissive as the Christian, none so inflexible; 
the worldling has no such sorrow and no such 
joy; nowhere are greater sympathy and tender- 
ness and love, but nowhere a judgment so 
searching, a severity so terrible, so awful a 
hate. The gospel does not take all the aspects 
of human nature and boil them down into one 
tasteless and colourless jelly; it takes each one 
and purifies It till it is tenfold itself. That is 
why the Christian is — has proved himself in 
history — at once the weakest and the strongest 
man in the world. 

It is on this last point I wish to say a word 
in view of current philosophies, and especially 
the philosophy of one remarkable, if also un- 
hinged, writer of modern days. Finding in 



258 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Christ such characteristics as gentleness, meek- 
ness, forgiveness, Nietzsche rejects Him as 
^ decadenf ^ and His morality as the 'morality 
of slaves,' preaching to us instead the ideal of 
the 'super-man' who shall exemplify a 'morality 
of mastery' in a life which above all else — 
above even distinctions of good and evil — is 
'power.' I shall not stay to repel this de- 
scription of Jesus, which, coming from poor 
Nietzsche, is pitiable even more than profane. 
Let us at once test the two prophets and their 
gospels in life and history. And this I will 
say confidently — in countless lives Christ has 
created the heroic, while Nietzsche evokes only 
the hectic. This so-called 'powerful' morality 
appeals not to genuine virility, but rather to 
that kind of femininity which is mastered by 
mere egotism.^ And it Is no contribution to 
power to declare 'I preach the over-man;' the 
thing is to produce him. When Nietzsche calls 

1 The Anti-Christ: An Attempt at a Criticism of Chris- 
tianity, § 31. 

2 This is an echo of a remark made somewhere by Eucken. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 259 

for 'masters,' we remember the Immortal re- 
tort : — 

'Why so can I and so can any man: 

But will they come when you do call for them?'i 

What we want from the prophet Is the source 
of strength. That Is not merely shouting; a 
really strong man does not go about announcing 
(as Henley does) an 'unconquerable soul' and 
that the years will 'find me unafraid.'^ Nor Is 
the source of strength a spirit that scoffs at 
love and pity and tenderness; a man Is never 
at his strongest when he Is only strength. Here 
Is the source of It. The strongest thing In all 
human history has been not a sword but a 
Cross. 'When I am weak then am I strong' — 
that Is the secret. The gospel has It, and that 
Is why the Christianity of the Cross has been 
an anvil which has broken many hammers. 
This combination of apparent contradictories 

1 Shakespere's King Henry IV., Pt. i. iii. i. 

2 From Henley's poem entitled Invictus — a striking poem, 
no doubt, in some respects. 



26o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

is unique in Christianity. Mr. Chesterton 
states it in his characteristic style : — 

'It is constantly assumed, especially in our Tol- 
stoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down 
with the lamb, the lion becomes lamb-like. But 
that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the 
part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorb- 
ing the lion instead of the lion absorbing the lamb. 
The real problem is: Can the lion lie down with 
the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That 
is the problem the Church attempted; that is the 
miracle she achieved.'^ 

It was not the Church that did it but Christ; 
but, that aside, the statement is not more epi- 
grammatical than historical. 

All this, of course, does not mean that the 
centuries are the basis of faith in Christ. He 

^ Orthodoxy, p. 177. The superabundant cleverness of this 
book is really its fatal defect as a plea for Christianity. For 
the one thing which cleverness never does is to touch the con- 
science, and this is the spot which Christianity cannot leave 
untouched. Thus Orthodoxy is an example of a brilliant 
religious apologia which leaves behind it hardly anything of 
a religious impression. However, it takes all kinds of people 
to convert the world, and this feature of Mr. Chesterton's 
work should not prevent the reader from perceiving the sound- 
ness of many positions in it regarding Christianity, which the 
book lights up, if not with apostolic fire, certainly with 
astonishing fireworks. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 261 

is that to Himself as One whose fellowship 
and forgiveness are for us of God. But the 
ages are a corollary to faith because they have 
not reduced the Figure who claims to be more 
than merely one other man among men. Time 
has tested Jesus, who presented Himself as 
a Lord and Saviour of men, and it has not 
found Him wanting as new epochs arose, new 
races were discovered, new types of life and 
character were brought into contact with Him. 
Time has placed Jesus, not as merely a Jewish 
peasant of a now long-past day, but as adequate 
to be the ideal and the inspiration of all time 
and of the whole humankind. The best and 
last proof of this is personal. My best self is 
recognised and realised before and with Him: 
yours, too. This is indeed the Son of Man 
and Saviour of us all. 

Amplifications and illustrations of how Jesus 
Christ has thus proved adequate to history sug- 
gest themselves, and are indeed obvious ; but we 
must pass on to the other part of our theme, 
and inquire what comment time has made on 
the Christian message. Here one crucial test 



262 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

may suffice. If Christianity be the supreme 
Word of God it claims to be, then it must 
have the element of finality. That, of course, 
does not mean that its content is discovered 
once and for all. On the contrary, the content 
of Christianity is only gradually being dis- 
covered; we have yet to learn what, for ex- 
ample, the Oriental mind will find in it in ad- 
dition to what the Greek or Latin or Teutonic 
mind has found. Finality, in this connection, 
means that the gospel never becomes obsolete, 
or something which, whatever value it may 
have had for circumstances of another day, is 
of no essential value for the new conditions of 
the world, and may therefore be superseded 
and discarded. This is a crucial test of the 
message of Christianity as the supreme and 
absolute religion, and it is one which may well 
be applied after twenty centuries and in view 
of the facts and problems of to-day. It is, 
moreover, a test of peculiar significance for an 
age such as ours, which is so conscious of the 
immense advance which recent years have wit- 
nessed in every department of thought that to 



THE COMiMENT OF TO-DAY 263 

be even 'early Victorian' is to be little better 
than a dodo. Whatever the present age is, for 
good or evil, certainly it is a new age. The 
result of this is that, in a great deal of modern 
thinking or writing, there is almost the assump- 
tion that Christian faith and Christian ethics 
cannot be looked to for the solving of modern 
questions. Indeed, the very idea of finality, in 
religion as in anything else, is to the present- 
day mind unacceptable and intolerable. The 
truth is that the strong wine of evolution has 
rather gone to the head of the modern philos- 
opher, and he lays down its principles a priori 
as applying to Christ and to Christianity with- 
out any special examination of the facts. It is 
true and indeed notable that there is to-day no 
very serious attempt to produce or predict a 
better religion — the new teacher whose coming 
is, I understand, anticipated in theosophical 
circles, need not be discussed till he arrives — 
but there is the wide acceptance, on general 
evolutionary grounds, of the idea that 're- 
ligions, like all things that are ours and human, 
have their day of declension; nor can Chris- 
is 



264 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

tianlty form an exception to the universal 
rule.'^ Well, this last remark says something 
which is not to be settled simply by laying down 
a priori a supposed 'universal rule,' but only 
by a fair examination of the facts about what 
Christianity is and can do to-day. This is what 
we propose to test. 

I wish to test this in as precise and practical 
a way as possible; what that way is I shall 
state presently. First, however, one word may 
be said of a general character about this 'rule' 
that religions decline and are superseded. 
What sets this in operation is visible in history. 
As a matter of fact, the force which most surely 
has caused religions of the past to be discarded 
is when their ideas — and especially their ideas 
of God — have been felt to be inadequate and 
unworthy by the growing moral sense of the 
people. A notable and interesting example is 
the ethical criticism which undermined the an- 
cient Greek religion. In that religion, the lives 
of the gods were a story of constant amours 
and intrigues and crimes. But the ethical sense 

1 J. A. Symonds's Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 5. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 265 

of the best minds In Greece began to criticise 
this. Euripides, for example, reproaches the 
god Apollo (who had seduced and then de- 
serted Creusa) just as a right-minded man 
to-day might denounce a betrayer of woman. 
Plato refuses to take as true of God Homer's 
story that Zeus sends to men lying dreams. It 
was this kind of ethical criticism that simply 
killed the old paganism of Greek legend, 
though It thus served morality. Now I hardly 
need to argue that faith in the God revealed In 
Jesus Christ — I do not say the God described 
in theologies — Is In no danger of being super- 
seded In this way. No one can demand In the 
name of conscience a purer or more moral and 
spiritual Idea of God than Is In the face of 
Jesus. That idea may be too high and good 
to be true ; but certainly the most ethically sen- 
sitive mind cannot say It Is not high or good 
enough to be worthy of God. What we mean 
by God,' says Goethe, *Is just the best we know.' 
Do we know or can we even conceive what is 
better than Christ? Along this line, then, of 
ethical criticism — which has been In the past the 



266 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

surest solvent of religious beliefs-^Christian 
faith is in no danger of being superseded. But 
I shall not develop this, nor make any further 
general remark on the declension of historical 
religions; let us come to those precise and prac- 
tical tests of the question before us of which 
I spoke. 

The line I suggest we should take is this. 
There are in the present day questions pecul- 
iarly characteristic of our times — what, indeed, 
we call 'questions of the day.' They have 
arisen in history long after Christianity arose. 
I think it will be recognised that it is a precise 
and practical test of whether the gospel is a 
message only for its own epoch, now long 
passed, or whether it has continuous and ever 
new truth in it for every age, if we inquire 
how far it has got it in it to touch and even 
to be indispensable in the solution of problems 
such as these — problems characteristic of the 
modern world and problems which were not 
even in the horizon of the mind of the genera- 
tion to which Christianity first came. There 
are two such 'questions of the day' which sup- 



THE COMxMENT OF TO-DAY 267 

ply — as again will, I think, be recognised — 
adequate and appropriate tests of these. One 
is what is called the social problem; the other 
what is called the woman's movement. The 
names are somewhat vague, but are sufficient. 
The bearing of these two matters on the issue 
before us I propose briefly to consider. 

In the first place, a reflection suggests itself 
about the existence or rather the rise of prob- 
lems such as these. They have more immedi- 
ately emerged in our time from education — 
from, in the one case, popular education, and, 
in the other, the higher education of women. 
But their ultimate source is far further back 
than that. It is, as a matter of fact, within 
the area of Christianity, and within this area 
only, that any such questions have originated. 
They have not arisen within other religions, 
even within a religion so humane as Buddhism; 
they have not been originated by secular phi- 
losophies, even a philosophy so enlightened as 
that of Aristotle. And it is not difficult to per- 
ceive how this is so. Both of these questions 
are at bottom questions of personality. The 



268 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

social question, In Its demands for higher wages 
and better conditions and restricted hours of 
labour, Is not merely an attempt — whether just 
or otherwise — on the part of the 'have-nots' 
to dispossess the 'haves;' deeper than that, it 
is the effort of the suppressed personality of 
masses of the people who are awaking to feel 
they have the right to the life not of machines 
but of beings with a soul to be called their own. 
The woman's question is not merely an agita- 
tion — justifiable or otherwise — for a political 
franchise; deeper than that, it Is essentially a 
demand that women shall not any more be re- 
garded as a subordinate means towards the 
life of the other sex, but shall be recognised 
as, in the full sense of the word, human persons 
possessing, as truly as man does, that person- 
ality which is not a means but an end. I think 
I am not wrong in saying that here is the root- 
thought common to both these movements. 
Now there can be no question whence this 
thought of the respect due to the personality of 
the worker or of woman took its birth — In, at 
least, any practical and effective sense. It was 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 269 

In this way the gospel spoke to the worker and 
to woman. Most truly has Guizot said: 'Ce 
n'est pas Montesquieu, c^est Jesus-Christ qui a 
rendu au genre humain ses titres/^ To this, 
Indeed, must be added the humiliating admis- 
sion that this thought of the Christian gospel 
about the personality of the worker or of 
woman has not been carried out In the practice 
of the so-called Christian state, nor has it 
always been even in the Church that its most 
faithful advocates have been found. This 're- 
proach of the gospel'^ — as Mr. Pelle has en- 
titled his recent Bampton Lecture — is undeni- 
able. It has its effect not only in alienating 
masses at home from Christianity because of 
social wrongs done or tolerated under its name, 
but also in counteracting the appeal of Jesus 
Christ to heathen peoples, who, seeing the 
slums and the streets of any city in modern 
Christendom, are repelled rather than attracted 
to a religion of which these are the fruits. But 
all this — which arises out of the fact that Jesus 

^L'Eglise, p. 153. 

2 The Bampton Lecture for 1907, by the Rev. James W. F. 
Peile, M.A. 



2 70 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

Christ has linked His gospel and even His 
reputation with a human stewardship which has 
proved so unfaithful as to be in danger of 
being suffered to be steward no longer — does 
not alter the historical circumstances in which 
such questions as those that have been named 
have taken their rise. We semi-Christian na- 
tions have not done right by the worker or by 
woman; but we know there is the right to be 
done. And where did we first learn that? 
There is, I repeat, no question as to the an- 
swer. We first learned it, or rather heard it — 
for learned it have we hardly yet — not from 
any socialists or feminists, but from Him who 
died for the slave as for the free, and who 
spoke to the soul of a woman on the same level 
as to the soul of a man. 

But I turn to the questions themselves, and 
first to the social problem. The phrase is in- 
effably vague, yet its meaning is very real to 
every awakened mind and conscience. The 
seemingly hopeless disorder and distress and 
degradation of the conditions of life of masses 
of men and women and children in this twenti- 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 271 

eth Christian century begets a profound pessi- 
mism within the heart of any one who even 
looks over the edge of the social abyss; but it 
is to-day what I will call an ethical pessmism. 
It is not the feeling which we perceive at the 
close of the Middle Ages, when men found the 
world so hopelessly bad that they could do 
nothing but wait for the coming judge: — 

'Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt; vigilemiis! 
Ecce minaciter imminet Arbiter, Ille Supremus!"^ 

The pessimism of to-day in face of social facts 
is deep; but why is It deep? It Is deep because 
it has, with new resolution, set Itself not to 
'watch' but to work. Therefore It realises the 
difficulty and desperateness of the problem as 
the world never did when It simply left It alone 
or even simply left It to the judgment of God. 
This Is a new kind of pessimism, and there is 
something at least like a hope at the heart of 

^ Bernard of Clugny's De Contemptu Mundi. Translated 
by Neale in the well-known lines: — 

'The world is very evil, 

The times are waxing late; 
Be sober and keep vigil, 
The Judge is at the gate.' 



2 72 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

It. To say it proves the dawn must follow is 
to say too much; but, certainly, this is the kind 
of darkness which must precede the dawn. 

Not, however, to dwell on this, I pass to our 
particular point, which is how far the Christian 
gospel is vitally related to this problem and 
essential in the solution of it. Now, on the 
surface, social reform is a question of political 
administration which shall effect a just re- 
organisation of the material conditions of life. 
As such it may appear to be a purely civil and 
secular concern, with which the gospel, even 
though touching all that is human, can hardly 
be said to be essentially connected. But in the 
whole trend of modern thinking on the subject, 
it is becoming more and more clear that the 
solution of the social problem is not merely a 
matter of political administration nor of merely 
the adjustment of the outward conditions of 
life. Let us look at this and whither it leads. 

That the problem is to-day being worked out 
on administrative and legislative lines is itself 
a development from the days of the classic so- 
cialism of Karl Marx, who predicted an even 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 273 

keener class war between capital and labour 
till at last, when the Intermediate class had 
been crushed out of existence, there would be 
a decisive conflict by which, he beUeved, the 
forces of labour would wrest the supremacy 
from the enemy and establish a new order. 
That this has not actually come true, and (in 
this country, at least) Is not likely to come true, 
is only because this conflict — which, Marx 
seemed to forget, is not between two abstract 
forces which go blindly to their fate, but among 
men who can foresee and to some extent divert 
disasters — has been evaded by the mediation 
of various kinds of legislative and administra- 
tive concessions, which have at least provision- 
ally and at the acutest points taken the edge 
off the antagonism. In this way has a con- 
stitutional socialism largely taken the place of 
a revolutionary one/ Instead of smashing the 
machine, social reformers now capture It. 
They got into Parliament, as the Labour Party 
do, to promote their ends; or they set them- 

1 1 say 'largely,' not entirely, for the revolutionary principle 
still lives, and was recently revived in what is known as 
syndicalism. 



2 74 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

selves, as so notably Mr. and Mrs. Sidney 
Webb have done, to educate expert opinion on 
the subject. This administrative and legis- 
lative social reform is going on more and more, 
and in this sense we are, as a statesman of the 
last generation^ said, *all socialists to-day.' 
And so we should be and must be. The single 
fact that there are millions of our people — to 
speak only of England — who are compelled to 
live in conditions which give the life neither 
of body nor soul hardly a chance, and 'who, if 
they spent every farthing they possessed on 
the bare necessities of life, would still be under- 
fed and inadequately clothed,'^ makes a de- 
mand for economic adjustment which must be 
met by legislative and administrative reform. 
But the interesting feature of much of the 
best modern thinking on the question of how 
it is to be done is this. It is those most ad- 
vanced in their convictions about social reform 
in the political sense who see most clearly that 

1 Sir William Harcourt, I think it was. 
2 'The Industrial Unrest,' by B. Seebohm Rowntree, in The 
Contemporary Re'vieiv, October 1911. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 275 

the solution of this most complicated problem 
is going to involve far more than a mere po- 
litical programme. The truth is the world 
cannot be saved by either its parliamentary 
legislators or its social experts. It must be 
saved by itself. This is the thought which is 
becoming more and more clear. It means that 
the deepest need towards the attainment of a 
new earth is what the distinguished social edu- 
cationalists whom I named a moment ago — 
and who make up, if I may say so, perhaps 
the most intelligent intellectual partnership at 
present working in England — called recently 
'a change of heart.' ^ There must be this alike 
in those by whom the problem is to be solved 
and those for whom, more immediately, it is 
to be solved. With the former, there must be 
the development of a new idea and principle — 
a moral and social motive in place of a material 
and selfish one; with the latter, there must be — 
along with better houses, higher wages, more 
time free from labour — also character and a 

1 'What is Socialism? A Change of Heart,' by Sidney and 
Beatrice Webb, in The Ne^u Statesman, 19th April 1913. 



2-]^ THE FACTS OF LIFE 

new Ideal of life. Without this 'change of 
heart' — which obviously is not legislative but 
personal — neither will men be constrained to 
do what is right to the down-trodden sections 
of society, nor, if it were done, would it effect 
a permanent good. Thus is it that social re- 
generation is a moral and personal even more 
than — or, at the lowest, as well as — a political 
problem. It will be accomplished, says Mr. 
Philip Snowden, not by a revolution, but by 
a co-operation of 'men and women of all classes 
whose moral senses have been developed.'^ 
Till something of this kind permeates heart and 
mind and conscience, the promised land is still 
afar off. No one sees this more clearly than 
Mr. H. G. Wells, who, whatever one may think 
of his Influence or of his qualifications to be 
a guide of the moral life either of individuals 
or of society. Is certainly a man who can think. 
He too speaks of 'the great Change;' and this 
is 'no mere change In conditions and institu- 
tions' but 'a change of heart and mind.'^ And 

^ In The Christian Common'wealth, 20th September 191 1. 
2 In the Comet's Tail, p. 303. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 277 

he twits the programmists who have schemes 
for socialistic regeneration by asking if their 
'aunts' or the 'grocer' or the 'family solicitor' 
can be counted upon for support/ That is to 
say, he sees the problem is not in programmes 
but in persons — is, in a word, in ourselves. 
This, of course, does not mean that it has 
ceased to be political — a matter of laws and 
administrative reforms, of houses and wages 
and material improvement generally. But it 
has ceased to be only that. It is personal as 
well as political, moral as well as material, an 
affair of the 'changed heart' as well as the 
amended statute. 

Now — and to come at length to our point, 
which needs but a word more to be clear — what 
is all this but just a coming back to the word 
of Christ, who said: 'The kingdom of God is 
within you'? What, then, is going to put it 
within us — Is going to give men this changed 
heart, this moral sense, this new self? I find 
the thinkers I have named throw little or no 
light on this. The authors of the article to 

1 New Worlds for Old, p. 225. 



278 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

which I referred on 'The Changed Heart' sug- 
gest merely the 'ever-widening adoption of the 
socialistic motive' through the preaching of the 
new Political Economy. Mr. Wells has really 
nothing to offer; sometimes he thinks the 'good 
will' is to come a long time hence, or (in the 
romance named a moment ago) lets his fancy 
picture the 'great Change' accomplished magic- 
ally by the swish of a comet's tail, which shall 
introduce a life where war and falseness and 
selfishness and ugliness shall be no more and 
there will be everywhere 'a new world.' Mr. 
Bernard Shaw on one occasion, speaking with 
unwonted seriousness, told the Labourists that 
'it is only by religion in the real sense of the 
word that you can get at people' — something, 
that is, which 'gets a man out of his own 
miserable fears and causes , him to identify 
himself with the Life-force of the Universe so 
that he feels his complete union with the 
human race;' but the gospel of this religion is 
apparently 'to popularize the ideal of equality' 
— by which Mr. Shaw says he means to 'dis- 
tribute money equally' — which 'does respond,' 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 279 

he somewhat strangely thinks, 'to a genuine 
want In human nature' and 'Is next to all our 
hearts.'^ It does not become the believer In 
Christianity to mock at the inadequacy of ap- 
peals such as these to change the human heart; 
these are the best appeals men can make since, 
as it seems to them as they look at the Chris- 
tian world and the Church, the appeal of the 
gospel is practically Inoperative. Socialists 
would not have turned to comets If Christians 
had been true to Christ. But it is permissible 
to say that any one, convinced about the ne- 
cessity of this Inward and personal renewal as 
a factor in social reform, has only to throw 
off his prejudice — ^unorthodox persons can be 
prejudiced quite as much as orthodox — in order 
to be led, even if it be past centuries of the 
selfishness and sinfulness of so-called Chris- 
tians, straight to Jesus Christ. I shall not here 
reopen an argument about Christ: I shall only 
say to look at Him and learn of Him, and 
above all live with Him, mean a new heart and 

1 Reported In The Labour Leader, 28th April 1911. This is 
a worthier Shaw than that referred to in Chapter vi. 

19 



28o THE FACTS OF LIFE 

a new motive and a new self as nothing else in 
the world does. And this means that the Chris- 
tian gospel — while it does not offer the solution 
of the social problem, which will still demand 
all the energies of political reason — is yet in- 
dispensable to the solution of it; and that Jesus 
Christ, from whom (as I said on an earlier 
page) the whole question really took its origin, 
is still the essential living factor in it. 

The bearing of this on the often debated 
question of the duty of the Church towards the 
social problem is immediate ; but it is not within 
the purpose of our present discussions to exhort 
upon that, and, moreover, I must now pass on. 

I pass to the second specific question which 
was named — the woman's movement. If I 
touch on this more briefly and only at one point, 
it is from considerations of space, and certainly 
not from any want of the due sense of the im- 
portance of the issues involved; on the con- 
trary, I believe that here is something at once 
deeper in its principles and more far-reaching 
in its consequences than any other movement 
(except the gospel itself) before the civihsed 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 281 

world. Of course, when I say this I am not 
thinking of the agitation for the suffrage; that 
is an arguable implicate of the wider idea, upon 
which the political reason will adjudicate ac- 
cording to whether it is or is not convinced that 
it will be for the welfare of the state. These 
pages are certainly not the place for the writer 
to inflict his views on this question upon the 
reader. By the woman's movement I mean 
something far greater than any mere franchise. 
I meant the idea — which indubitably is perme- 
ating the mental, moral, and social atmosphere 
of the times in which we are living — of the new 
sense of equality between men and women. 
The term 'sex-equality' is capable of misuse, but 
I mean it here in its true sense. It does not, 
of course, mean that there are not natural 
differences between men and women which will 
always be, and which, moreover, will always 
involve differences in political and also in per- 
sonal relations. And it does not mean anything 
so foolish as that men and women are equal in 
everything; there are some things men will 
always do better than women, just as there are 



282 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

others women will always do better than men. 
Nor does it mean anything so abhorrent as a 
sex-rivalry or sex-war. It means, on the con- 
trary, something common to both — the human- 
ity common to both; and therefore that a 
woman, equally with a man, has the full rights 
and also responsibihties of that humanity. 
Thus, woman's life at its best is complementary 
to man's just as man's at its best is comple- 
mentary to woman's; but also, in her case as 
in his, life is more than this, and she has the 
right to be herself as he has to be himself. 
Again, the contribution which women can make 
to the common work and welfare of the world 
will be most successful when it is in co-operation 
with that of man, just as man's will be when 
it is in co-operation with that of women (and 
has often failed from lack of this) ; but she, 
as well as he, has a responsibility which is direct 
and is not limited by what may be appended 
to the other's. This I take to be the root-idea 
of the woman's movement. It is with us to-day, 
and will be with us more and more, profoundly 
influencing the whole life of civilisation. I have 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 283 

already pointed out the connection between the 
gospel and the origin of any such Ideas. We 
have now to ask If, in any vital sense, the gospel 
is indispensable In the application of them in 
our own times. 

As I have said, I am going to touch on only 
one point. It by no means exhausts the subject, 
but it is what we want — a crucial test-case; 
moreover, what is essential to be said upon it 
can be said in not many sentences. There is 
nothing which this new relation between men 
and women, looking at each other with eyes 
level, will more surely affect, and nothing by 
which its results will more severely be tested, 
than the standard of morality between the 
sexes. Just because it is essentially the claim 
of personality, it cannot but express itself in 
this connection; and just because it is a claim 
for equality in personality, it cannot and will 
not accept the dual standard — one for man and 
another for woman — at present generally rec- 
ognised. Whatever else it may or may not 
do, the idea of sex-equality (in the sense ex- 
plained a moment ago) will — not, of course, 



284 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

suddenly or immediately, but surely and gradu- 
ally — make these two codes approximate. 
Obviously this may result in either of two 
directions. It may mean that women will more 
and more claim the licence of the laxer stand- 
ard now widely tolerated in men; or it may 
mean that the higher standard, now demanded 
of women, will more and more be also and 
equally demanded of men. The former alter- 
native I do not discuss because it is something 
to be, wherever it appears, not discussed but 
simply fought; the one remark I make in pass- 
ing from it is that, in any section of society 
which descends to it, it is women who will have 
to pay the price. But assuming the other alter- 
native, I wish to press the question of how this 
is to be maintained otherwise than with the 
Christian ideal and the Christian law. I cannot 
see that any merely naturalistic and utilitarian 
principle of ethic will maintain it — not to say, 
with any power enforce it. For naturalism, 
which is with Christianity as regards such 
things as justice or truth, or even, to some ex- 
tent, benevolence, is not clearly with it as 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 285 

regards the equal obligation of purity upon man 
as upon woman. From the point of view solely 
of natural consequences to the individual, the 
family, and the state, this obligation may be 
broken by a man with a degree of impunity 
which, for obvious reasons, does not apply to 
a woman. It is just this fact which the natural 
man has fastened on to his own mean advan- 
tage, and because of it, defenders (whom I 
shall not here quote) of that dual ethical code 
to which reference has been made can, from the 
purely utilitarian standpoint, make a case, as 
a case can be made from the wrong point of 
view for any wrong thing. Therefore, I ask 
again, how, apart from Christianity, with its 
commanding principle on this matter and its 
constraining power, are you going to maintain 
the higher equal law of purity? There are, 
of course, very many non-Christians who them- 
selves are true to it, but this is individual prac- 
tice. I do not find that our modern non- 
Christian authors, especially in fiction — and I 
am thinking not of the baser kind — lay it down 
as a law. Only Jesus Christ is the law of this. 



286 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

By this I mean no merely ecclesiastical or the- 
ological canon or dogma. I mean that when 
Jesus Christ is brought into any human life — 
whether the life of a man or of a woman makes 
not the least difference — then only one principle 
is here possible. That is what I mean when I 
say that Christ is a law in this matter, and He 
is the only law in it. I shall not pursue this 
subject further, though I need make no apology 
for having touched on it, for it is vital both in 
the woman's movement and for the social 
future generally. But I think enough has been 
said or indicated to make clear the point for 
our present purpose, which is that in this vital 
issue, which must develop in one direction of 
the other out of the idea of the equal person- 
ality of the sexes, the Christian law and ideal, 
far from being obsolete and useless, are, on 
the contrary, indispensable if the inevitable 
future approximation of these two standards 
of morality is to mean not a levelling down but 
a levelling up, and is to be the vindication and 
the victory not of the lower but of the higher 
law of life. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 287 

This, then, is the conclusion which I think 
we may reach regarding the permanence of the 
value of the Christian message for our day as 
tested by the two specific problems which have 
been briefly discussed. The conclusion is not 
that the Christian gospel is of itself the solu- 
tion of these problems, which in many respects 
remain problems to be worked out by what I 
have called the political reason, and God has 
not given us the gospel to save us the trouble 
of using our reason. But it is that the gospel 
is an indispensable element in their solution. 
To put it even more simply, these problems 
need Jesus Christ. These 'questions of the day' 
— of this late twentieth century — cannot be 
truly answered apart from Him. 

Now if this be true, it is but the exemplifica- 
tion in two typical instances of a greater general 
truth with which I shall now draw this chapter 
and, with It, the book towards an end. 

If these questions need Christ, so does the 
world. This Is to be said of the present age 
with very special cogency. The world to-day is 
changing In a way which is making many 



288 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

thoughtful men — and among them even those 
who have no strong personal need of Jesus 
Christ — realise that momentous issues for man- 
kind are involved in the place which Chris- 
tianity may hold in the world of to-morrow. 
I have space to mention but one aspect of this. 
The world is becoming unified. It is not merely 
that its territory is practically all discovered 
and delimited, but — what is much more impor- 
tant — it is being knit into an interrelated whole 
through, chiefly, the dual factors of education 
and commerce. Nowhere is the effect of this 
more profound than in the far Orient, where 
great nations are passing with extraordinary 
rapidity through a tremendous transformation. 
It is hardly too much to say that all the potent 
forces which in our European history operated 
singly and with long intervals between them 
under such names as the Renaissance, the Ref- 
ormation, the Revolution, the Social Move- 
ment, the Educational Enlightenment, and 
others, are to-day operating all at once in 
India and China and Japan. Amid the vast and 
varied consequences of this, the effect on 



' THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 289 

religion is inevitable and will be profound. 
Polytheism and ancestor-worship have no fu- 
ture in this new era. The prospect therefore is 
imminent of the opening of the sluice-gates for 
the flooding of the world with great material- 
istic civilisations which have discarded the re- 
straints and reverences of their old faiths, and 
have found no other instead. The only alterna- 
tive presented to these nations is the name of 
Jesus Christ. It is thus that not only particular 
questions need Christ: it is the world which 
needs Him. In the most unexpected quarters 
indications appear of how men feel this to-day 
about the future of the world, even when (as 
I have said) they may not feel it in their own 
personal life; the last indication of it is the 
recent call of the new Republic of China for 
the prayers of its Christian people.^ From all 

^ This remarkable action is not to be represented as meaning 
more than it does mean. But it means at least a sense that 
Christianity is an element in the national life which may have 
something vital or valuable for the nation at its period of 
crisis. Not dissimilarly, exactly sixteen hundred years ago, 
Constantine turned the eyes of the pagan Roman empire to 
Christianity, not so much out of his own personal faith ai 
with the feeling that this religion was the coming thing, and 
the hope of the future lay in it. 



290 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

this, and from the facts which give rise to it 
— into which I cannot now further enter — I 
draw but two thoughts, one about the world 
and one about the Church, and so close. 

About the world, it suggests the thought that 
the real hope of progress is bound up with Jesus 
Christ. Progress is an idea which the modern 
mind — exhilarated, as I have already in this 
chapter suggested, by the strong wine of evo- 
lution — is apt to assume too easily, as if it 
were an axiom of life and history which is the 
pledge of a glorious future. This is not a very 
far-seeing or accurate view. In the first place, 
evolution as a secular process has its terrible 
as well as its inspiring aspect. The disillusion- 
ing pen of Anatole France reminds us that 'the 
human race is not capable of an indeterminate 
progress,' and that some day 'when the sun goes 
out — a catastrophe that is bound to be' — 'the 
globe will go rolling on, bearing with it through 
the silent fields of space the ashes of human- 
ity.'^ But if this despairing future seems too 
distant to impress the mind, let us test the idea 

^Le Jardin d'Epicure, E. T., by Alfred Allinson, pp. 26-7. 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 291 

of human progress within the narrower area of 
history. Undoubtedly there has been in human 
history an Immense advance In some things. 
Of these I will name, as perhaps the chief, these 
two — knowledge and comfort. The progress 
of knowledge Is such that a schoolboy to-day 
knows things which were hid from Aristotle: 
the progress In comfort is hardly less, and the 
necessities of the people of the twentieth cen- 
tury are the unheard-of luxuries of the most 
wealthy of past ages. In these respects, this 
day — of books and schools, of telephones and 
motor-cars — is Incomparably in advance of 
days gone by. But neither comfort nor even 
mere knowledge is the deepest thing In life. 
Let us test the Idea of progress by two deeper 
things. The two most real tests of life are, 
I imagine, happiness and character. If, then, 
we look at the evolution of human history — 
apart, so far as this Is possible, from the law 
and gospel of Jesus Christ — do we find a real 
and certain progress in these things? I greatly 
doubt it. I do not find the non-Christian 
product of twentieth century civilisation a hap- 



292 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

pier thing than some old Greek who lived in 
Athens in the days of Pericles or, in some 
quieter spot of Hellas, tended his herds and 
saw the sunlight on the violet sea. As regards 
character, a man who to-day casts off the re- 
straints of the higher morality is easily, and 
indeed is essentially, a worse man than any 
example of lust or cruelty in the days of pagan 
Rome, and certainly merits a deeper damna- 
tion. In a word I do not find that life and 
history, apart from Jesus Christ, assure any 
great happiness or any high ethical elevation 
for mankind. M. France — in the work from 
which I quoted a moment ago — summons, as 
the two truest judges on human life. Irony 
and Pity. And indeed it is true : these are the 
two thoughts which the human spectacle leaves 
in the observant mind. But this is the human 
spectacle as viewed by one who has never recog- 
nised its Divine Hero. When with human life 
and human history is linked Jesus Christ and 
something of what we have found Jesus Christ 
to be and to mean for man and for the world, 
then and then only does the pity deepen into 
sacrificing and saving love, and the irony is 



THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 293 

transfigured into faith and hope. It is He that 
is the star of human destiny; and better than 
any evolutionary law — in part terrible and in 
part dubious — and its pledge of progress is 
He who is the Light of the world which shall 
never set. 

The other thought suggested by what has 
been said applies more particularly to the 
Church. The Church of to-day often bewails 
the spiritual flatness of the age, and its indiffer- 
ence to religion. I am not disposed to accept 
all such strictures on the irreligion of this age 
without qualifications, partly because any one 
who reads religious history and biography 
knows how such things are said of many ages, 
and partly because I would judge the religion 
of an age, as I would that of a man, by the 
state of the conscience, and I think the con- 
science of the present time is indisputably 
awake as that of many an age — even more 
orthodox — in the past was not. Still, that 
there is a flatness in the religious life of the 
Church to-day is only too evident. Now, in 
past times, deliverance from such times of flat- 
ness has come to the Church through great re- 



294 THE FACTS OF LIFE 

vivals of personal religion, when the souls of 
men were stirred to cry out 'What must I do 
to be saved?' For this revival many seek the 
signs; many would even manufacture its ap- 
pearing. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, 
and the breath of this spiritual revival does not 
come. May the reason be this? We ask God 
to speak to the age. Was there ever an age 
in history when more distinctly God was speak- 
ing? He is speaking to the Church to-day — 
so that, as I have indicated, even the world can 
hear it — in the great problems of the social cry 
for justice and In the great need of the heathen 
world for Christ. That is God's voice as really 
and as surely as any conviction of guilt in the 
soul of an awakened sinner. May it not be 
that only as the Church hears these calls of God 
will His Spirit again descend upon her with 
power and blessing? The revival awaiting the 
Church may be one In which men shall turn 
again to Christ, saying not only — though this 
will ever be with the other — that He and He 
only Is the Saviour of their souls, but that He 
and He only is the Saviour of the worlcj, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



t^ 



^■-. / 



